Are you as confused as I am every time you’re handed the menu at a restaurant? Of course you are. Delicately sprinkling words we’ve never heard of across a single white page to make what we’re being offered to eat a complete mystery that’s dusted, drizzled and deeply steeped in pretension, is all part of today’s most important culinary revolution. If you’re not digesting a ladle of new words with every meal description you’re really not eating out.
It seems that’s why restaurants exist now. To challenge your verbal palate. And to make you feel really quite small for your lack of knowledge as they stare down at you, and I don’t mean because you’re seated and they are not.
Luckily I always leave quite sleepy, with my belly full, so I forget the humiliation enough to go out and do it again. Isn’t it great there’s no grudge that can’t be smoothed over with duck fat?
If you’re scoffing, you’ve clearly not eaten out recently, or you’re eating at Denny’s which is delicious so that’s fine, but hear me out. Restaurant menus have become complicated. They look like someone stole the judges’ scorecards at a spelling bee and then handed them around. Satiated with big, verby things they seem to go to greater and greater lengths to tell you what has been done to the food items you will eat.
Gone are the days when a breakfast menu, for example, had eggs – fried or poached – with toast and bacon. Now eggs are “coddled”, which sounds a little rude to me in all honesty. Surely coddling is something you should not do to unborn chicken? Or, eggs are “shirred”, which sounds like drunk stirring from the Keith Floyd School of Cooking where the first ingredient was always a bottle of wine in the chef. I’m certain it’s something more complicated than that. And then these eggs come with a mushroom conserva, merguez, or yoghurt chermoula. I know what a mushroom is. I know yoghurt is. Is Chermoula where that nuclear disaster happened?
Chefs hats off to these restuarants though, because they are swimming upstream like the salmon with agro dolce, abamelle and arroz negro they are serving. Yes, I have no idea what those things are. Or if that’s the correct spelling. (For all I know they could be chopping up the dictionary and just making up new pretend words). I say this because while every other printed medium tries to stay away from big and strange words, purposely making things shorter for a population whose singular reading matter is Facebook posts, restaurants are saying screw it – my short words not theirs – and making you wade through lengthy descriptions of assations, brunoises, gribiches and escacbeches. Leaving us all Googling what these words mean surreptitiously under the table like school kids cheating on our math papers.
Now I know you’re probably thinking I should stop dining at pretentious restaurants, and you’re right. Denny’s is great, and grilled cheese is pretty easy to say. But I do challenge that notion. Even the simplest of neighborhood restaurants seem intent on making you learn a word of the day. And if they can’t find a fancy term for how they are cooking something, they will go to great lengths to ascribe the exact geographic locations of your tomatoes, chickens and cocao nibs. They will place a “from the region of…” in front of a sugar cube if they have to. And honestly most of the places sound a little like they’re from ‘Game of Thrones’.
Let’s talk about asking the wait staff about these words/locations. I figured out that as a rule of thumb the greater the number of words on a menu you do not know, the higher the likelihood that you will be made to feel like an utter yam for asking, an Oliver Twist saying, “Please Sir can I have some more simple words to explain what you’ll really be doing to my eggs back there”.
So, are these all just pretty ordinary ingredients, and cooking methods, and farms, and writers have just got in on the game, realizing the print medium is dying so they are having their last word suppers all over menus? Or are chefs watching too much ‘Chopped’ and feeling like they have to find the next way forward with an egg? Or – and this is my favorite theory – are English professors slipping through the backs of kitchen doors and saying, “Look, they are sitting still, at a table, they can’t leave until they get an exorbitant bill, let’s teach them some new words. Their brains have been coddled for too long.”
I like my theory. Or maybe I’m hoping as human beings we will continue to evolve our language beyond “likes”, “cutes” and “LOLs” so when we do go out for dinner we sound smarter than the food we eat. Or maybe I’m trying to divert my immense annoyance at the mental hoops I have to leap through to earn my dinner. Maybe I’m just “hangry”. Ha, take that new word, fancy restaurant. And bring me some damn coddled eggs. With chermoula. And a gribiche.
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