Farm to Table, Circa 1938
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Billy Rose was one of the great theater figures of the last century. He began as a lyricist (among other things he wrote It's Only a Paper Moon), was married to Fanny Brice (Funny Girl) for almost ten years, and became a producer (there is still a Broadway theater named for him). But as I perused this old menu from The Diamond Horseshoe, the nightclub he ran in the Paramount Hotel near Times Square, I realized he also had one of New York's first farm-to- table restaurants. (The farm was apparently bought before the United States joined the war, in anticipation of rationing.)
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If you'd like an image of the dining room, here's one from the New York Public Library archive.
And here's the menu. The night club opened in 1938 and closed in 1951; I'm not sure what year this menu dates from, but from this comment about the taxes, I suspect it was during the war years.
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(Sorry I cut off the prices; the lemon sole was $3, the lobster $4.25, everything else either $3.50 or $3.75.)
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