Menu Descriptions

[gfweb]

Exactly right. Decadent...sinful...to die for....death-by-whatever all insult the diner's intelligence and taste. They are vulgar in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

[Synergy]

Exactly right.  Decadent...sinful...to die for....death-by-whatever    all insult the diner's intelligence and taste.  They are vulgar in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

←

I don't know... I have had enough desserts actually live up to the descriptor that I don't mind those terms. I don't think it's vulgar if the dessert is good enough to push you right to the brink of insanity.

[hathor]

Exactly right.  Decadent...sinful...to die for....death-by-whatever    all insult the diner's intelligence and taste.  They are vulgar in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

←

I don't know... I have had enough desserts actually live up to the descriptor that I don't mind those terms. I don't think it's vulgar if the dessert is good enough to push you right to the brink of insanity.

←

Synergy, I like your 'right to the brink of insanity' description. I wonder how that translates into Italian....

I think the use of decedant, sinful, etc. are a) almost iconic. It signals a super rich desert and

b) just lazy.

[gfweb]

Synergy, I like your 'right to the brink of insanity' description. I wonder how that translates into Italian....

←

[hathor]

Synergy, I like your 'right to the brink of insanity' description. I wonder how that translates into Italian....

←

Stunad as in "Hey Paulie, whaddayou... stunad?"

←

[kellytree]

Short menu please.

Menu's in other languages - if I'm visiting a place for a day or two I just point my finger and pray that I won't get some nasty dish.

Multi language menu's are fine -- sometimes they are damn funny too with the way things are translated.

I think if you have a restaurant where you know a lot of languages will be coming in you are probably doing yourself a favor by having them in different languages but all on the same menu.

[Stigand]

Short descriptions are best.

With a few exceptions:

1. If a dish has a really genuinely special ingredient (e.g., new season's X), it makes sense to highlight it

2. If you have a non-traditional ingredient in a well-known dish. (My bugbear is restaurants that offer 'Club Sandwich' or 'Caesar Salad' on their menu, and bring it to the table with unannounced hard-boiled eggs in it. I LOATHE hard-boiled eggs.

Long descriptions generally fall into one of two traps: 'trying too hard', or 'no class'.

a) Trying too hard: If a restaurant lists the name of every ingredient in the name of each dish, it comes across like they're a bit too eager to show how creative they are; if they list the provenance of every bloody clove of garlic it's equally tiresome. If a restaurant wants to stress its sourcing policy, it's classier to do this in a footnote ("beef from XXX; vegetables from YYY, etc"); if it wants to list the ingredients in each dish this looks better underneath each dish, rather than in the dish's "title".

b) "No class": Pizza Express, a respectable chain of thin-crust pizza restaurants in the UK went down this route when they rewrote their menus a couple of years ago. Their pizzas used to have a name, followed by a simple list of ingredients: "La Reine; mushrooms, ham, olives" - classy. Now, they read: "La Reine: Prosiutto cotto ham, olives and mushrooms, a royal combination that once made the Italian Queen's favourite pizza". Ugh - if I want a menu that looks like it's been written for morons by a used-car salesman, I'll ask for one.

[Khadija]

This is a slight change of topic, but I hate it when dishes are given redundant names. For example, at a local co-op run, university crowd cafe, the eggplant sandwich is called "The Mondragon." The name says nothing about the sandwich; it's of no use to customers.

[LittleChef22]

I prefer just a couple sentences to describe a dish. If you need more information, that's what the server is for.