How a Mining-Camp Bakery Became a Restaurant Legend of the American West

An early Hotel de Paris bill of fare or menu provides a fascinating glimpse of Louis Dupuy’s restaurant during its formative years (1875–1879) when it transitions from Delmonico Bakery to a restaurant within Hotel de Paris. It suggests the establishment was already more sophisticated than an ordinary mining-camp eating house, but its cuisine was not exclusively—or even primarily—French. Rather, Dupuy appears to have combined French culinary training and European standards with hearty American frontier fare.

Bill of Fare, 1870s

This 1870s bill of fare should not be interpreted as the complete expression of Dupuy's cuisine. It is more likely an everyday menu, with special or seasonal dishes appearing when available.

This early version of Louis Dupuy’s menu is especially valuable because it captures the restaurant at the moment when a modest bakery/restaurant operation was becoming more ambitious. The menu also challenges the idea that “French restaurant” did not necessarily mean that every dish was French.

What Does the Bill of Fare Reveal?

 

1. It was an ambitious à la carte public restaurant, not a boarding house serving family-style.  The heading, “ORDER BILL OF FARE,” indicates customers made their choices from various selections. There is an unusually broad range of options for a small Colorado mining town: multiple cuts of beef, veal, mutton, pork, ham, eggs prepared several ways, fried foods, cold cuts, dairy dishes, cakes, toast, coffee, tea, and chocolate.

2. Meat was the centerpiece of the meal.  The menu is extraordinarily meat-heavy and designed for a substantial, protein-rich meal, appropriate to a community of miners, businessmen, and travelers in a high-altitude mining town.  Customers could choose pricey beef such as porterhouse, sirloin, tenderloin steaks, or veal cutlets.  More affordable options were mutton chops or pork steaks.  There is also ham, bacon, sausage, liver with salt pork, pigs' feet, brains, tripe, cold roast beef, cold ham, and tongue.

3. Early on, Dupuy elevated his menu offerings through a variety of preparations by offering onions, mushrooms, and breading for meats.  His menu occupies an interesting middle ground because his ingredients are familiar to Americans, but the preparation reflects Dupuy's European culinary background.

4. The restaurant catered to diverse levels of appetite and pocketbook by offering a significant range of prices. A customer could order a 10¢ (approximately $2.55 USD) serving of wheat cakes, corn cakes, buckwheat cakes, toast, coffee, tea or milk—or spend $1.00 (approximately $25.50 USD) on a porterhouse with mushrooms.  This makes the restaurant seem less like an exclusive luxury establishment and more like a graded dining experience: inexpensive staples for an ordinary customer alongside elaborate and expensive preparations for someone wanting something special.  Particularly revealing, is the 25¢ (approximately $6.37 USD) threshold: orders above 25¢ came with bread, butter and potatoes, making a substantial meal easy to construct.

5. Eggs were an important part of the restaurant's repertoire.  The egg section is surprisingly extensive and includes boiled, fried, scrambled, poached on toast, and a broad range of specialty omelets.  The last group is especially telling. A rum omelet, jelly omelet, and mushroom omelet may go well beyond the basic frontier boarding-house breakfast and demonstrate Dupuy's interest in culinary variety.

6. The absence of game and fish itself is interesting.  The menu has prominent headings for “GAME” and “FISH,” but the surviving image contains no dishes beneath them, which may indicate that those foods were seasonal or market-dependent, rather than consistently available. This is important because later descriptions of Hotel de Paris emphasize wild game and seafood, including oysters.  However, a March 1879 meal served to Jay Gould and other railroad and financial magnates included oysters, sweetbreads, and Peach Charlotte (a warm, baked pudding of stewed fruit and brioche bread with brandy sauce.

 

Birds-eye view of Georgetown, Colorado (1874)

What Kind of Restaurant Was It?

The Hotel de Paris Restaurant Dining Room could be characterized in the period 1875–1879 as a sophisticated European-influenced restaurant operating within a rugged American mining community—combining substantial frontier appetites with the culinary ambitions of a French-trained chef.  It was not yet the fully developed, luxurious Hotel de Paris restaurant that would emerge after the 1878–79 expansion after Dupuy purchased the Powers Building and renovated and expanded the restaurant dining room (christened Louis’) and constructed a new commercial kitchen.

What Kind of Cook Was He?

Louis Dupuy's genius appears to have been Europeanizing the experience of eating, rather than simply importing a French menu. A Georgetown customer could eat steak, pork, ham, eggs, potatoes, and bread—the foods already known—but could have them prepared with mushrooms, onions, sauces, and other techniques associated with more sophisticated cookery.  This helps explain why descriptions could regard the establishment as a first-class French restaurant while its surviving early menu looks remarkably American. Hotel de Paris was, from the beginning, selling quality, choice, refinement and Dupuy's personal culinary expertise, not merely French food.  After 1879, Dupuy offered increasingly elaborate European/French cuisine, fine wines from around the globe, and further developed his reputation as the Best Cook in the Colorado Territory, which attracted wealthy travelers and nationally prominent guests.