Beloved Shelter Island restaurant Vine Street Café will be hosting a Love Menu Art POP UP Art Fair on July 26 and 27 from 10am – 5pm on the grounds of the Café. Love Menu Art is an organization that rescues menu art from restaurants, bars and saloons, cafes, diners, drive-ins, nightclubs and hotels that are on the brink of being discarded and restores them for presentation at the Art Fair. Love Menu Art’s mission is to make sure these historic and imaginative images that record the colorful history of dining out are not forgotten, but instead are celebrated by the public.

Vine Street is hosting the pop-up fair as part of the restaurant’s commitment to creating and delivering a culinary experience that exemplifies food as art: handcrafting food and all the components that ensure the freshness and purity of the ingredients. Vine Street Café’s approach to food and dining is just as meticulous and conscientious as Love Menu Art’s approach to curating and restoring menus, a fact which is evident from just one bite of their delicious menu.

Visitors to the fair can browse, shop, and eat lunch at the VSC Food Truck in an outdoor seating area while enjoying wine and beer. The POP UP Fair will offer many sizes of Love Menu Art archival prints for purchase, starting at $15, 100% cotton kitchen towels from $16, coaster sets from $15, and note cards for $4.

The Love Menu Art collection of menus hails from all over the world dating from the late 19th century through the 1970s. A particular favorite period is from the years 1930–1960. This was a boom time when proprietors hired celebrated artists and highly talented illustrators to create stunning imagery to market their restaurants and themselves. Whimsical illustrations depict fish smoking pipes and cigars, prawns and cockroaches wearing top hats. Voluptuous brunettes sit astride lobsters and devil-like women drain their cocktail glasses in New York bars. A select group of private collectors have generously opened their collections to Love Menu Art, and even public institutions like the Culinary Institute of America have provided source material.

The process of restoring these recovered treasures can be extensive. Some are damaged, so they have to be physically and digitally repaired to minimize the wear-and-tear done over time. Professional art restorers and talented digital artists work to remove coffee and gravy stains, erase creases, and repair tears, but are careful to let the charm of the original document shine through.

Vine Street Cafe has been offering a fine dining experience in a quaint atmosphere to both locals and tourists alike since Terry and Lisa Harwood opened the restaurant in 2003. Seasonally and locally sourced, Vine Street Cafe is open at 5:00 pm Thursday–Monday for dinner. The VSC Market next door stocks freshly prepared sauces, salads and other gourmet specialties in addition to its Steak Sauce, such as the Cafe’s fresh Bolognese Sauce, Smoked Ribs, Meatballs, Salmon Burgers, Duck Confit, VSC Basic Tomato Sauce, Mushroom Bolognese Sauce and North Fork Chunky Vegetable Sauce, all of which come with instructions and menu suggestions.

*To shop the Love Menu Art collection and to enjoy the delicious fare from Vine Street Cafe, stop by the fair at the Café, 39 South Ferry Road, Shelter Island, New York.

• Tiffany Goldstein