Remember When Restaurants Had Cigarettes On The Menu?

(gothamist) Cigarettes, they're what's for dinner? Yup, long before Nanny Bloomberg came and kicked New York City's smokers to the curb, the scent of burnt tobacco used to permeate the city—restaurants used to even sell smokes as an after dinner treat!
For almost a year now the New York Public Library has been in the process of digitizing its menus (with the help of YOU) and one of the benefits of all that work is you can now search for terms found in many of the menus. As of this morning, cigarettes appear on 402 menus in the collection, first appearing in an 1884 menu and making their last appearance on a 1987 menu (not all of those are restaurant menus though—menus from cruise ships, trains and formal events are in the mix too). And considering the size of the archive, that is just the beginning. Continued