menu

Menu in French is an adjective meaning small, slender, detailed — from Latin minūtus (made smaller, diminished), from minuere (to lessen). The phrase menu de repas meant 'the detailed plan of a meal.' By the eighteenth century, menu was used alone to mean the list of dishes available at a restaurant. The word names the writing, not the food. A menu is a document.

The restaurant menu emerged alongside the restaurant itself. Before the late eighteenth century, travelers ate what was offered at inns and taverns — there was no choice. The first restaurants in Paris, opening in the 1760s and 1770s, offered individual dishes that customers could select. This required a written list. The menu — the detailed, itemized record of what was available — was the administrative innovation that made the restaurant possible.

The oldest surviving restaurant menu in the world is from the Palais Royal in Paris, dated 1803. It lists soups, roasts, salads, and desserts with prices. The format has not fundamentally changed in over two centuries: item name, brief description, price. The design of menus became a field of its own — menu engineering, pioneered by Michael Kasavana and Donald Smith at Michigan State University in the 1980s, studies how layout, language, and placement affect what customers order.

The computer menu — a list of available commands or options — was named by analogy in the 1960s. Xerox PARC's graphical user interface work in the 1970s popularized drop-down menus, pull-down menus, and context menus. The restaurant word colonized computing. The 'File' menu on your screen is named after the card a waiter handed you in eighteenth-century Paris.