Love is a menu splendid thing
Australian newspaper The Age featured an article today (or is it tomorrow? They’re hours ahead of us, so…hm. Never mind. It’s in their 12/23 edition.) covering two of my most favorite things. Words and menus. I am a menu addict. I’m the type of person you don’t want tagging along with you to any big city, but NYC in particular. I will stop in front of every restaurant I walk past, scanning for a menu display on an outside wall, so I may then stand there in food rapture, memorizing every word of each glorious dish. The language of food is so rich and diverse that hundreds of books have been written simply to translate for the rest of us just what the heck it all means. You may have noticed, menus are becoming more and more complicated, and beginning to read a bit like bad poetry. And that’s where The Age comes in with their article, “Mincing words.”
The article is essentially a call to bring back the days of simple menus, with descriptions that don’t read like haiku, and are easy to understand even for someone who has never spent even five minutes with The Food Network and Alton Brown (who I happen to love, love, love, but the man does get very wordy and technical. It’s Alton’s world, I’m just living in it). I agree. There’s a way to write a beautiful menu and create amazing dishes without consulting the Oxford English Dictionary (Unabridged). I feel this change would allow the customer to choose a simple bowl of soup without developing a migraine in the process.
One last note:
The final tragedy of ridiculous menus is the 10-minute parade of specials that spews forth from the waiter before even having the opportunity to dull the pain with a cocktail. What a way to ruin the conversational flow. If I want to stop conversation in its tracks, I usually just do it the old-fashioned way. By getting a huge wad of spinach stuck in my front teeth. Here’s to tradition!
