Retro Menu: The Italian Room, Partenkirchner Hof Hotel

Look, another retro menu that I bought at a flea market, er, antique mall! I got it for a dollar, and what a find it is!

It’s for a restaurant called The Italian Room, at the Partenkirchner Hof Hotel, in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, Germany. It’s a resort town offering skiing in Germany’s highest alpine peak, the Zugspitze. The town was famous as the home of the 1936 Winter Olympics, where Alpine skiing made its first appearance as an Olympic sport. . . . Then the Nazis took over the hotel . . . and then the American Army monopolized after the war.

The Italian Room, which dates to the American Army’s use of the hotel, is long gone. I think this menu dates to about 1950. The Partenkirchner hotel was a “leave and rest center” for the US Army. The last line of the front of the menu reads “USAREUR Leave and Rest Center”; USAREUR means “US Army in Europe.” (Now, it’s the USAREUR-AF, since the US Army Africa was combined with it in 2020.)

The hotel is still there, having gone back into private ownership in 1959. It’s now called Reindls Partenkirchner Hof. It looks like an amazing place. You can read about its history here.

While you’re online looking at stuff, here’s another hotel in the area that has a similar history; its website has a more thorough description of postwar American presence in the area. Indeed, the different hotels in the Garmisch area served different cuisines; one offered a “Chuck Wagon Steak House,” another had a “Pagoda Room,” another had a “Hawaiian Room.” These and other cuisines moved around among different hotels.

And here’s a big long, scrolly-scrolly page of memorabilia about the US Army in Garmisch.

Anyway, I’m just sharing this menu. Remember that you can click on my blog pictures to make them bigger.

I think it’s interesting that they were offering Italian food at the literal peak of the Bavarian Alps. Perhaps this was supposed to offer American soldiers a break from the wursts, schnitzels, kartoffel, spätzle, and kraut.

I’m also amused by the artwork on the front, depicting stereotypical scenes of sunny Italia—all those lusty, rustic, romantic Italians playing guitars, dancing with tambourines, and drinking wine from a wineskin. Mamma mia!

The inside of the menu is preprinted with a color field guide to pasta shapes, so you don’t have to embarrass yourself by not knowing your mezzanelli from your bucatini, or your ragitone from your denti-delegante. You had the choice of pasta, then you could decide to have it with tomato sauce, meat sauce, meat balls, or fresh sausage. Saturdays and Sundays, the specials were lasagne and ravioli. They also served pizza, which you could customize with toppings.

I often think about how American soldiers, returning from Europe, brought back with them a love of Eye-talian and other then-exotic cuisines. Back in America, they were likely to say, Yeah, let’s go out for a pizza pie!

The “Chef’s Specials” were typed (using carbon papers; this was before photocopiers, of course) and stapled to the more permanent menu.

I’ll let you read the rest of the menu via pictures. It’s a really interesting mix of what apparently was truly fine food prepared by people who knew what they were doing, and dishes like “Cheeseburger,” “Fried Chicken,” “T-bone Steak,” and “Bacon Lettuce Tomato” sandwich—stuff familiar at any American diner.

Whenever I find something like this at a flea market, er, antique mall, I pretty much figure that it was left over from someone’s military mementos. Someone had served in Europe, as part of the USAREUS, then probably passed away, and his (yeah, probably a “his”) family or survivors jettisoned the stuff. I find it fascinating. I hope you do, too.