Sweet and Savoury: Menus from the collections of The State Library

Enjoy a taste of our menu collection.

Menus are kept as part of the State Library of South Australia’s ephemera collection. Ephemera is material which is designed to be short lived – such as posters, handbills, programs, wine labels, and advertising material. In fact, such everyday ephemeral items are a record of South Australian life and social customs, arts and popular culture, and local and national issues.

From the plain to the ornate and from the simply functional to the beautiful, the State Library has many thousands of menus. This exhibition looks at menus from our oldest, a dinner at Government House in 1867, through to those recently acquired from South Australian restaurants large and small celebrating cuisines from around the world. The menu collection has many hidden stories, showing not just how our eating and drinking tastes have changed, but also the changing styles of graphic design.