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Had a chuckle at this excerpt:

"The guests feel struck with awe in that dining-room, and solemnly bolt their food as quickly as they can. You hear less noise in an American hotel dining-room containing five hundred people, than you do at a French table d’hôte accommodating fifty people, at a German one containing a dozen guests, or at a table where two Italians are dining tête-à-tête."

The author clearly has a ranking of how much each nationality speaks while eating :)

It's actually really interesting, because it's nothing like that these days. Now, it's the Americans who are easily the loudest people in the room.
I thought this was hilarious, too. And I'm so sending it to my Italian friends.
Sadly, no photographs of late 19th century American hotels are given. I found this post which has some nice photos:

https://www.vintag.es/2017/05/41-rare-photos-of-american-hot...

Our downtown hotels are late 19th century. So I just have to turn my head slightly to the left as I walk to breakfast at a cafe :)
[Great read, thanks /samclemens!]

The menus are out of control!

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh...

True. Altough that is the menu of a special event. The annual Game Dinner at the Grand Pacific Hotel, Chicago.

You probably shouldn’t expect Antelope Steak there everyday.

In the middle of the 19th century, the US was known as a place where animals were in such abundance that you could get an incredible variety of meats. Check out The Market Assistant: https://books.google.com/books?id=2z4EAAAAYAAJ&printsec=fron...

The game section is where the goods are, and starts getting good around page 123

With a 15x smaller (human) US population in 1850 compared to today that makes sense.
The theatrics read like a caricature of European elegance, which is what I imagine they were. I had a conversation with a family friend the other day, an age-old exercise in trying to reconcile the often contradictory movements of the American sociopolitical body. It suddenly occurred to me: not for morals or money, on either side, but, ultimately, to avoid humiliation on the global stage. We don't want to be seen as backwards, a backwater, underdeveloped, unserious, unsophisticated. So: we build railroads, we build skyscrapers, we tear down Jim Crow, we go to the moon. And, occasionally, we take the wrong impression of what would impress our international neighbors and it backfires, apparently.

Still, if only we could harness this proclivity for healthcare and housing or guns... I suppose the starkest signal of the breakdown of American stability is that not even the embarrassment of being the odd, terrible one out on those issues has spurred us to action.

Love it but where does Ketchup fit in?
I don't get the reference.

OR

"You don't want to know."

If you enjoy this style of writing with its pithy observations then I can recommend J.P. Donleavy's "The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners":

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unexpurgated-Code-Complete-Survival...

I read this on a train and the tears were dripping off my face whilst trying to control my laughter. I got plenty of funny looks.

Donleavy's "The Ginger Man" is also well worth a read.

As an aside, I hate layouts that are a single narrow column with a huge swathe of space on either side. It's hard to get into the flow of reading when having to move to a new line constantly.

(never mind, even Hacker News reformats my example for me)

You might want to read the site guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

Oh, my apologies.I'll refrain from doing that in the future! It's like I'm, standing in front of a mirror and saying "Dang" three times, ha ha.
This guy sounds like a real joy to travel with.