The Emperor Norton Sundae: Vintage Ghirardelli Menus Edition
In 2004, a keen-eyed observer noticed that the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company had taken the Emperor Norton Sundae off the menus of its Ice Cream & Chocolate Shops.
The Emperor Norton appears to have been on the Ghirardelli menu for at least 40 years.
Back in the day, a Ghirardelli shop was called a Soda Fountain & Candy Shop. And the Emperor Norton Sundae was one of only five "Nob Hill Sundaes" on the menu.
In the early 1960s, the Emperor Norton went for $1.25, and it had "half of a walnut on top."
From Ghirardelli menu, early 1960s. Source: Dieter Zander Collection, New York Public Library. © Ghirardelli
By the mid 1970s, the Emperor Norton had inched up to $1.75. And now, rather than having "half of a walnut on top," it was "topped with nuts" — no doubt, a concession to the economic necessity of getting the most out of every bulk bag of nuts, including the little pieces at the bottom.
From Ghirardelli menu, mid 1970s. Source: Rusty Thomas Menu Collection, University of Hawaii. © Ghirardelli
In 1984, the Emperor Norton Sundae was $3.70. Nothing else had changed.
From Ghirardelli menu, August 1984. Source: Marilyn B. Feingold Menu Collection, Johnson & Wales University (page 4 in the pdf available for download here). © Ghirardelli
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Twenty years later, the Emperor Norton was gone. In August 2004, Cammy Blackstone — then a morning show host at San Francisco radio station KFRC — registered her dismay at her discovery of the deletion. Leah Garchik of the San Francisco Chronicle reported on this (sixth item here).
Veteran California historian Robert Chandler picked up on Garchik's report with a letter to the editor of the Chronicle, in which Chandler suggested that "if San Francisco wishes to do penance for these slights to His Majesty, the city could lobby for the never named western span of the Bay Bridge to become the Emperor Norton Bridge." Chandler formalized the suggestion with a letter to then-mayor Gavin Newsom.
This episode appears to have been the spur for longtime Chronicle cartoonist Phil Frank (1943-2007) to pen his extended Farley comic strip series educating readers on the story of Emperor Norton and carrying the flag for naming part of the Bay Bridge for the Emperor.
The Farley series on the Emperor and his bridge ran from September 2004 to March 2005. (You can see the whole series, together with Chandler's letters, here.) About midway through this period, then — and now, again — San Francisco District 3 supervisor Aaron Peskin introduced a resolution to name the entire Bay Bridge system for Emperor Norton.
In December 2004, the Board of Supervisors did pass a resolution. But it was to name only the new eastern crossing of the bridge — the "Oakland side" — for the Emperor. Shortly after this — surprise! — the bridge-naming effort ran aground.
But I digress. This is a piece about ice cream.
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To be fair, the Emperor Norton is not the only longstanding Ghirardelli sundae to have been shown the door. Of the five Nob Hill Sundaes that anchored the Ghirardelli menu for decades, only the Golden Gate Banana Split and the Strike It Rich still are on the menu today. The Twin Peaks and The Rock also have been discontinued.
But it's the loss of the Emperor Norton Sundae that seems to rile. Over the last couple of years, our good friend Joseph Amster, who plays Emperor Norton as an historical walking tour guide and general character-about-town, has been waging a campaign of sorts to bring the Emperor Norton back to Ghirardelli.
So far, the demand has fallen on deaf ears at Ghirardelli. If the company doesn't mend its ways, Joseph has pledged to stage a protest this September in Ghirardelli Square.
Will the Emperor Norton Sundae return to the Ghirardelli menu? Certainly, the ingredients already are on hand in every Ghirardelli shop. Vanilla ice cream, bananas, hot fudge sauce, cherries, whipped cream and nuts. Couldn't be simpler, really.
Stay tuned. Perhaps before long you once again will be able pop in to a Ghirardelli shop to check your choice of an Emperor Norton. Just like in the 1970s.
Ghirardelli order blank, mid 1970s. Source: Rusty Thomas Menu Collection, University of Hawaii. © Ghirardelli
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UPDATE: 16 February 2021
In 2004, as we mentioned above, KFRC radio host Cammy Blackstone noticed that the Emperor Norton Sundae had disappeared from the menu at the Ghirardelli ice cream shop in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square.
Blackstone mentioned this to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik, and Garchik wrote it up, sparking what became that year's movement to name the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge after the Emperor.
In the years since then, it typically has been reported that the Emperor Norton Sundae was taken off the menu of the Ghirardelli Square shop in 2004.
But, I always have pointed out that 2004 is when someone noticed the absence and, with the help of a well-placed friend, spread the news to the San Francisco masses — the removal itself could have happened earlier.
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Here's something new...
A search on Google finds blog mentions and Yelp reviews, dating back as far as 2009, of a "Domingo Sundae” at the Ghirardelli Square shop. Contemporaneous photos and descriptions make it clear that the Domingo basically was an Emperor Norton Sundae.
On 22 September 2000, the San Francisco Examiner published a piece by metro reporter Rachel Gordon, looking at the city's great food spots through the lens of how she first experienced them as a kid when her family moved to San Francisco from Chicago in 1969.
Gordon writes [emphases mine]:
Excerpt from Rachel Gordon, "Best eating ensconced in neighborhoods," San Francisco Examiner, 22 September 2000, p. 78. Source: Newspapers dot com
When we were really living it up, my family would hop on a Hyde Street cable car Friday nights for a ride through Russian Hill down to Ghirardelli Square. It was an era — pre lawsuit frenzy — when riders still helped the gripmen turn around the cable cars at the end of the line.
We'd pass the street artists, the Ruth Asawa mermaid fountain and head straight for the chocolate factory. I always went for the biggest sundae, the Emperor Norton, that had two scoops of vanilla ice cream, bananas, whipped cream, hot fudge, walnuts and cherries. All that for $1.35. Today, the same sundae, renamed after Domingo Ghirardelli, who founded the chocolate factory in 1853, costs $6.78 with tax.
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It appears that the Emperor Norton Sundae itself continued to be offered for at least a couple of decades after the name was changed — there are mentions of the Domingo Sundae being introduced at Disney California Adventure in 2019.
But, when did the name change take place? In recent days, we’ve uncovered a couple of Ghirardelli menus from the 1990s. Based on these menus, the Emperor Norton Sundae was rebranded as the Domingo Ghirardelli Sundae sometime between 1990 and 1996.
Here's the description of the Emperor Norton from the August 1984 menu:
Goblet ringed with bananas and cherries. Two big scoops of vanilla ice cream. Hot Fudge Sauce and whipped cream. Topped with nuts.
By the time of the menu was printed in July 1990, here's how the Emperor Norton description appeared:
Here sits two noble scoops of vanilla ice cream in a throne of hot fudge sauce with bananas towering from all sides...robed with whipped cream and crowned with almonds, chocolate chips and a cherry.
Here's the description of the Domingo Ghirardelli Sundae from the September 1996 menu. It’s an almost verbatim copy of the Emperor Norton description from 1990:
Here sits two noble scoops of vanilla ice cream in a throne of hot fudge sauce with bananas towering from all sides...robed with whipped cream and crowned with nuts and a cherry.
And, here’s that 1996 menu, with the Domingo third in the list of Nob Hill Sundaes but no mention of Emperor Norton:
From Ghirardelli menu, September 1996. Source: Marilyn B. Feingold Menu Collection, Johnson & Wales University (page 1 in the pdf available for download here). © Ghirardelli
We can see here that the name of the Emperor Norton Sundae had been changed by September 1996 — at least eight years before the Chronicle took note in 2004.
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