A painter and a businessman, an emigre and an epicurean, W. Dieter Zander was an oddity typical of the shifting currents of the midcentury; his collection of six hundred lovingly preserved restaurant menus at the New York Public Library is a monument to everything he sampled course-by-course during his mouth-watering life. However, the menus are not of primarily gastronomic interest. In the collection’s focus on striking cover illustrations—ranging from avant-garde to kitsch—Zander preserved an important relic of pop aesthetics. In the menus, in the most literal way possible, we find the public’s appetite for fine art.
Born in Germany, Zander closed out World War II as a POW in Kansas, becoming popular with the guards by pointing out the truly unreformable Hitler sympathizers. Before settling in New York, he returned to Central Europe, not to hide his head in shame or curse the Allies, but to help US troops recover art from Salt Mines. Zander’s imprisonment in America appeared not to poison him against the wider world but to whet his appetite for travel (which he often did as a bilingual banker), to spark a hunger for fine art (he traveled in artistic circles and painted privately), and lay the table for a life of fine dining (which, given the breadth of the collection, he took every possible opportunity for). It is perhaps unsurprising that he became keenly interested in the design of restaurant menus, filing away excellent ones in his growing collection. His taste, in both covers and cuisine, was the stuff of his life, mixing sleek American grandeur, post-war experimentation, and old-world folksiness. Zander’s paintings never rose above mediocrity; he had a better eye for menus. The collection was his great aesthetic triumph.
Menu design is art with a purpose and much of the Zander collection shares a theme: Eat here now. Take, for example, the cover illustration for Maxwell’s Bistro. A contrast is made between the stiff straight lines of the diners’ outside clothes and the rounded glasses, grapes, and casks of Maxwell’s. The faces (and berets) have begun to take on a softer roundness too, as though the early stages of aperitif have already taken effect. The dessert menu for Aureole achieves a more surreal effect with white-hatted chefs waiting for the final course to fall from the sky. Cavanagh’s on West 23rd Street has a wonderful Manhattan period painting, with the sky above the restaurant clearer and more romantic than the other buildings on the block. Charles & Biggles Bar has a Robert Motherwell swirl with a twist—it’s made of beans, seeds, and spices. Alluring and provocative presentations helped to sell meals, but Zander was also drawn to stranger fare.
Consider the front page woodcut for Bareschur, with its evil-eyed bear and its Black Lodge flooring. Riche Teatergrillen, a still-open Stockholm restaurant, has a vivid bright cover promising magic (fish are blown out of what I believe is a tuba), entertainment (a jester has painted the sky the color of his clothes), and white tablecloth dining (undisturbed by the show). In contrast, the Blue Onion drive-in has a simple titular style. Each page of the menu is styled like another slice of the vegetable. Not all of Zander’s menus are beautiful, the cheap kitschy dinosaur painting adorning Kinder-Speisekarte recalls the horrors of American children’s television, equal parts Dragon Tales and Caillou, nor are all of them menus, although the American Express-issued Guide to Good Restaurants in Copenhagen has a wonderful Milton Glaser feel. They are all part of a singular vision and the uniqueness of the Zander collection justifies any failures of perception.
A terrific source of information on Zander is the (still-live) auction listing of his painting “Spring Bouquet.” John Berg Fine Art and more calls Zander a “long-lived gentleman with an extraordinary life history” who rose to the “highest corporate levels” was “quite active in New York social circles” and “still found the time to be a most talented artist himself.” We should all be so lucky. Although Berg does describe Zander the artist as “most talented” he also refers to his painting style as “greatly simplified” and notes the pale imitation of De Staël’s blocky landscapes. “Spring Bouquet” is listed at four hundred dollars “with just a little paint loss.” It has been available for some time.
If he wasn’t an artist of genius, W. Dieter Zander, like Albert Barnes or Isabella Stewart Gardner, was a collector of genius — which is by no means a lesser achievement. As the eclectic elegance of Barnes’s and Gardner’s museums stand in contrast to the blandness of curation by committee, Zander’s eye for menus is an important contribution in itself. He was not simply someone with a strange, compulsive hoarding-adjacent hobby. Zander did more than bless the Needle Museum with a haystack. The New York Public Library also houses a more encyclopedic collection menu donated by Miss Frank E. Buttolph — who not only kept every menu she ever received but would write to restaurants requesting more and even advertise in newspapers. The 25,000 menu Buttolph collection could not be more different than the 600 menu Zander collection. Zander was an artist, with an artist’s eye. And an artist’s appetite.
