For whatever reason, the VS dev team decided to remove the Recent Projects from the File menu. Thankfully, they did not removed the command itself.
The only thing one has to do is right-click the menu bar (or go to Tools / Customize), switch to the Commands tab page, select the File menu bar entry in the combo box, add a new menu named Recent &Projects, and move it wherever you like. Then select the newly created menu bar in the “Menu bar” combo box and add the command Recent Project List.