This delightful menu cover with its welcoming verse is from the Seven Dwarfs Inn and is dated 1956 – we know this because the person who saved the menu wrote the date they ate there.

A surprising number of diners, restaurants and motels used the Seven Dwarfs as a theme. With no location on the menu, we don’t know where this one was located. However, it must have been quite a large establishment since it offered its patrons Orchestra Nights for an extra 50c per person and it also had catering services. There was a special section for Italian foods with ‘real’ Italian spaghetti for 90c a plate served with mis-spelled ‘parmisian’ cheese. This mistake is understandable because Italian food would have been quite exotic back then.

Italian food became a mainstream part of the American diet in the 1950s and 60s as more Italian immigrants opened restaurants that served Americanized versions of classic dishes like spaghetti

The seven dwarfs are Doc, Sneezy, Grumpy, Happy, Bashful, Sleepy, and Dopey and they were, and remain, beloved cartoon characters from Disney’s 1937 animation fantasy Snow White.