What’s On the Menu? The American Appetite for French Cabaret!
Drawing upon some promised gifts and loans from long-term library supporter and board member, Vicki Gold Levi, The Wolfsonian organized, installed, and opened an exhibition of menus and associated ephemera in time to celebrate this year’s South Beach Wine & Food Festival. Titled What’s on the Menu, this installation examines how restaurant and dinner club owners took advantage of new print technologies and graphic design strategies to create alluring menu covers and printed marketing materials to promote their venues.
The installation, which will be open to the public through May 26, 2024, is divided into two sections and is displayed on two floors: our third-floor library foyer and the vitrines in our first-floor ramp leading to the museum gift shop. One section, subtitled Destination Dining, examines the ways in which a newly mobile leisure class began to travel for pleasure aboard ocean liners, trains, and airships to tourist destinations renowned for their iconic eateries.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Loan
The other section of the exhibition, subtitled Dinner and a Show, focuses on the covers of menus and programs used by restaurant, cabaret, and nightclub owners to pack their venues with patrons hungry not only for food, but for entertainment provided by celebrity performers, risqué vaudeville comedians, titillating burlesque dancers, and glamorous showgirls.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca
At the outset of the curatorial project, I was faced with an “embarrassment of riches” with so many items from which to choose. Inevitably, the work of a curator involves not only selecting those items that best tell the story, but also weeding out less critical items given the limited space available in vitrines and cases. Fortunately, blogs impose fewer constraints, so I have opted to publish a short series of posts that will allow me to delve more deeply into themes less substantially covered in the installation. In them I will include information that did not make it into the exhibit’s descriptive and interpretative label text and will also feature some items regretfully culled from the physical exhibition.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
In organizing the exhibition, I was struck by just how many venues used images of scantily clad showgirls on their promotional pieces as their chief form of appeal—the subject of this first post. In the 1930s, many American nightclub owners looked to the Moulin Rouge and other famous Parisian cabarets as a model for attracting customers. The glamorous Chez Paree nightclub opened in the Streeterville neighborhood of Chicago in 1932 and pulled in patrons for more than two and a half decades by offering fine meals served with a side of vaudeville acts, musical entertainment, and chorus girl dancing.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
Defying the Depression, in the mid-1930s a business conglomerate created a chain of stylish dinner clubs with venues in Chicago, New York, London, and Miami Beach. Taking over the vacant Rainbo Gardens theater on Lawrence Avenue and North Clark Street in Chicago, the businessmen commissioned Jules Stein and Corlett Huff to redesign, redecorate, and reopen it in the summer of 1934 as the French Casino. Stein, who served as president of the Music Corporation of America, hired Clifford Fischer, the legendary booking agent and producer of the Ambassadeurs theatre-restaurant in Paris, to organize, import, and tour a French-inspired cabaret floor show (the “Revue Folies Bergere”), as touring entertainment for the clubs. Chicago Tribune critics described the French Casino as “the most ambitious café entertainment now on view in Chicago.”
The popularity of Chicago’s French Casino likely contributed to the proliferation of other French-themed cabaret clubs in this era, but they may also have been inspired by the release in February 1935 and April 1936 of two Maurice Chevalier films, The Man from the Folies Bergere and Folies Bergere, capitalizing on and perpetuating the French cabaret craze in America.
In April 1935, another French Casino dinner club opened at 1235 Washington Avenue on Miami Beach, this one designed by architect Thomas Hunter Henderson. Like its Chicago namesake, the dinner club gained notoriety for its celebrity entertainers, vaudeville comedians, and cabaret performers.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift
By 1937, however, the live comedic performances and chorus girl productions proved too costly to maintain and the theatre was converted into a motion picture cinema.
Inspired by Paris’ world renowned can-can chorus line dancers at the Moulin Rouge cabaret, the Boston showman, E. M. Loew, raised eyebrows in café circles when he opened The Latin Quarter nightclub on Palm Island in Miami Beach in 1940.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
Two years later, Loew partnered with Lou Walters to open another Latin Quarter on Broadway and 48th Street in New York City.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection
Despite pessimistic prognostications that New York already had too many nightclubs, their venture flourished, with Loew explaining his formula for success: “Always give the public its money’s worth—wonderful shows, great stars, exquisite girls, good food and keep prices as moderate as possible.”
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
World renowned for its Broadway revues, New York City, offered a tantalizing array of nightclubs to entertain tourists and locals. In the 1930s, the Hollywood Cabaret Restaurant, on Broadway at 48th Street, booked the famous heartthrob saxophonist, crooner, and bandleader, Rudy Vallee to draw in the dancing crowd. The dinner club also offered nightly floor shows, with revues drawn from scenes from popular Hollywood movies. At least one critic noted that the chorus girls appeared to have been chosen more for their good looks, shapely legs, and willingness to don revealing costumes, than for their talent as dancers.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
The Versailles nightclub opened in a former opera house located in midtown New York in the late 1930s. The club won notoriety for its European-style revues, with showgirls performing three times each evening. It also offered a nightly cabaret featuring singers such as the famous French chanteuse, Edith Piaf.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
Opening in 1937, the International Casino was the largest of New York City’s popular, if short-lived, dinner clubs. It was housed in a streamlined modern building on Broadway near Times Square before it closed in early 1940.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
Billboard magazine claimed that Café Zanzibar offered the “best colored show in town” after the 1940 closing of the Cotton Club. It featured top African American performers such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and others and did not exclude Black patrons, though they were seated in separate sections away from center stage.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
The front cover of a souvenir program for Dave Wolper’s Hurricane Club, located on Broadway at 49th Street in New York City, indicates that showgirls were a major attraction for its patrons as well. A caricature portrait of jazz bandleader Duke Ellington on the back cover, also suggests that celebrated musicians were another major draw. Ellington had performed at the infamous Cotton Club in 1938, but he next appeared onstage in New York City only after he signed a six-month contract to lead the house band of the Hurricane Club in 1943.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
The Carnival dinner club operated out of the Hotel Capitol, in North Times Square. Brooklyn-born restaurateur, Nicholas Macario (“Nicky Blair”) served his patrons recipes that he learned from his Italian nonna (grandmother). But Blair also knew that any recipe for success in the business also required providing his customers with top notch entertainment. The Carnival treated its guests to vaudeville schtick, the bawdy humor of comedian greats like Milton Berle, and burlesque acts. Blair also hired Broadway producer, John Murray Anderson, to choreograph and stage “America’s Loveliest Girls in a spectacular revue” to keep the seats filled.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
Broadway producer, theater, and nightclub owner, Billy Rose also organized extravaganzas that relied on the beauty and talent of female performers. Rose created the popular Casa Mañana Revue (featuring exotic fan-dancer Sally Rand) for the Texas Centennial Celebrations, and Aquacade spectacles for the Great Lakes Exposition and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In the late ’30s, he filmed and brought his Casa Mañana show to Times Square, where he opened Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
Nightclubs featuring beautiful showgirls remained popular in New York City well into the 1940s, as soldiers and sailors and marines preparing to deploy overseas during the Second World War were eager for female entertainment before departing. Even after the war’s end, chorus girls remained an important New York City attraction. In an attempt to get the public to embrace a polio vaccination program in 1947, publicity photos were taken of Billy Rose’s leggy showgirls doing their part, lining up to get their shots.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
Club Harlem dominated Atlantic City’s nightlife for more than fifty years. Opened by the father-son team of Leroy and Cliff Williams in 1935, Club Harlem accommodated two bandstands, a long and spacious bar, and seating for nearly a thousand customers. In the era of segregation, the club featured performances by “Sepia Revue,” “Beige Beauties,” and its own Club Harlem showgirls. Before the club finally closed in the 1980s, it could boast of having hosted such entertainers as: Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., and many others.
Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi
The Wolfsonian installation, What’s on the Menu includes menus and souvenir programs from a number of West Coast restaurants and nightclubs as well. The exhibit features numerous promotional materials produced for Earl Carroll’s supper club-theater in Hollywood, California, which opened to the public in 1938. The venue proved popular with Hollywood directors and stars, and more than 100 celebrity-autographed concrete blocks lined the exterior “Wall of Fame.” A 20-foot-tall neon portrait of Carroll’s companion, (the glamorous entertainer, Beryl Wallace), was positioned above the entrance alongside Carroll’s trademark words: “Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.” Glamorous performers also adorned the menu covers, postcards, and photograph sleeves used to promote the club.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised Gift
After Carroll and Wallace died in a plane crash in 1948, the theater was sold. But in a fitting tribute to the influence that Parisian cabarets held sway over the American imagination, Las Vegas showman Frank Sennes reopened the club as the Moulin Rouge in 1953.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Promised gift of Vicki Gold Levi
Although most of the items included in this post do not appear in the current exhibition at The Wolfsonian–FIU, there are many other menu covers and other promotional materials sporting French cabaret-themed imagery on display, so those of you residing or visiting South Florida are encouraged to come see “the real thing.”
Wolfsonian-FIU Library 