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Things to ban from restaurant menus
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The Chicago Tribune just ran a short but hilarious list of phrases that should be banned from restaurant menus. Some of the banal buzzwords include: "World Famous" (How exactly did your fish sandwich earn that distinction?); "Garden Fresh" (From a garden in California, perhaps?); and any perversion of a foreign language to make a pedestrian dish sound exotic.
Now the readers have added their two cents to the fray. Most menu idiosyncrasies don't bother me too much, and in fact, I prefer the less-slickly-produced mom-and-pop list of edibles because: 1. A simple menu implies the proprietors are paying more attention to- and money on the food they're preparing than on the way the menu looks, and 2. A big chain isn't behind the restaurant making sure the menus are homogeneous clones of one another, whether you're eating in Bangor, Maine or Ballwin, Missouri.
However, I abhor poor grammar (plural vs possessive errors make me shudder) and misspellings. That said, I find hokey phrases strangely comforting and endearing, probably because I take them all with a grain of salt anyway. I do find one local pizza restaurant's derivative of "Homemade" quite charming because the spelling on menu implies that the pizzas are not made in a style reminiscent of your home, but they are instead produced by a garden accoutrement (without the "e") or a particularly promiscuous person.
Now I ask, gentle reader, what are your menu annoyances? What makes you think twice about dining at a restaurant just by reading the menu? Sound off in an email and I'll post the best submissions. Keep it clean and respectful and I will fight the urge to publish the name of any offending restaurant. Send your menu grievances to: stlfoodexaminer@gmail.com
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