Delicate plump cushions of free range egg enriched, durum wheat artisan pasta, ripened under a Tuscan sun, encasing rennet free, organic, silky, goats milk cheese studded with fresh lemon thyme and cracked black peppercorns, poised on a crushed tomato, garlic and onion infusion and lightly showered with a fine mist of freshly teased, aged Parmigiano Reggiano – or cheese ravioli with tomato and parmesan ?In many restaurants today the menu descriptions are more inflated than the chef’s ego! What is the logic ? Do they believe that embellishing the menu descriptions entitles them to charge higher prices? The style of menu writing in McDonalds seems a little more down to earth and in tune with their client base. Maybe that’s it, customer expectations in upmarket restaurants are more to blame than the chef’s aspirations for poetic immortality.
Well I’m not so sure that chefs have ever paid that much attention to the guest’s experience of menu reading. Years ago menus were concise, structured and totally lacking in poetic licence and could only be navigated by the discerning diner. Every chef got his own copy of
“Le Repetoire de la Cuisine” which was not a recipe book but his very own little red book of culinary codes and writing menus was an easy task.
First choose your meat or fish, then the cut or preparation mode and finally tag on a garnish. Thus meat – veal, cut – saddle, garnish – Romanoff, appeared on the menu as
Selle de veau Romanoff and every chef knew it was culinary shorthand for a saddle of veal which had been braised before removing the fillets, cutting them into regular shaped scallops, covering them with a cream sauce containing minced cepes, topped with another sauce of béchamel finished with crayfish butter, surrounded with braised half fennels oh and by the way don’t forget to serve the braising liquor separately. Yes every chef knew it but did every diner?
No I’m afraid that the authors of menus then, as now, liked to keep a little distance between the chefs and the diners, a little superiority, a little reverse snobbishness – we know something you don’t know ! The modern approach has been to drop the French but replace it with verbose dish descriptions which often read like a recipe or a geographical survey and render menus to frequently be works of complete fiction with the dish which is thrust before you often bearing little resemblance to what you think you ordered.
In ultra trendy restaurants taking their lead from establishments such as El Bulli and The French Laundry, the arrogance takes the form of “chef jokes” where the unsuspecting guest experiencing the tasting menu does not have a clue what he is eating and has to be guided through the process by waiters with the exhausted, ill concealed, impatience of a driving instructor late on a Friday afternoon.
I’m afraid it is once again the Japanese who have managed to strike the right balance, their menus are structured, service procedure and dish compilations are exactly the same in every restaurant, sushi nigiri is sushi nigiri, miso soup is miso soup and the quality and elegant presentation of the food is a role model for chefs everywhere – it’s just a pity they speak English with such a funny accent.
