Mistakes in menus tend to fall into two categories: there are the typos, spelling mistakes and translation errors that happen when the menu is written by someone whose grasp of English isn’t perfect and then there are the flowery descriptions that trip themselves up.
Those in the first category are often funny but are also understandable. Texass chilli, garlic chicken breath and pumping pie all sound very similar to their correctly spelled versions. My personal favourite was an Italian restaurant in Edinburgh that offered a ‘three course lynch’. More can be found here.
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Less forgivable are the menus that have been penned by a chef or restaurant manager who day dreams of being a novelist. I am all for a menu being informative but draw the line when the description of each dish actually has a narrative arc. Happily, the trend now is to keep it simple with even the most fantoosh restaurants settling for a straightforward list of the main ingredients and perhaps a brief indication of how they have been cooked.
Glasgow’s Gamba is often included in lists of the city’s top tier restaurants but they feel no need to gussy up their menus: ‘Lemon sole, grilled or pan-fried in lemon butter’ tells you everything you need to know. In Edinburgh, the much vaunted Atrium takes a similar approach with their ‘braised brisket of Borders beef, mash, crushed roots’.
The opposite of this useful simplicity is a dish I saw in an arts venue café in Glasgow. ‘Perthshire lamb smothered in ratatouille’ said the menu. I know that if we eat meat then we should face up to how it gets on our plates but isn’t there a more humane method to go about it?