How to get rid of Emacs's menu bar in terminal windows?

The standard answer is to put

(when (not (display-graphic-p))
  (menu-bar-mode -1))

in init.el. However, this solution is not good, because all it does is remove the menu bar after the fact. You can still see it for a split second. It's very annoying.

Looking at the source code in startup.el I don't see an obvious solution to this problem. I think the only way is to use before-init-hook. Maybe this could do the trick?

(add-hook 'before-init-hook
          (lambda ()
            (setq emacs-basic-display t)))

But this hook is run before init.el and other init files are evaluated, so how is one supposed to use it?