To many diners, including myself, the menu of a restaurant is its most important selling tool. The menu – both its writing style and the dishes being described – dictates whether or not I will enter an establishment, even if the restaurant’s reputation is sound.
The way it is written is huge. It needs to offer some familiarity as well as the unusual for the more curious diner. It should offer a balance between a description of ingredients, and how the dishes are prepared. An imbalance denies the diner information necessary to make a selection.
One thing I’m not a huge fan of is the overly excessive menu description, with its “nestled on a bed of” or “served with a symphony of” and “lathered with a sauce of” etc. That kind of writing reminds me of my early days in the trade, of a place we all thought was trendy back in the nineties, a place where I wish it had stayed.
Of course what really drives a menu is not the actual writing itself but the addition of new dishes, or an entirely new seasonal menu. At The Fearrington House, when we write a new seasonal menu, or a unique menu for say a Wine Maker Dinner or a tasting menu for our cooking school guests, creating a menu is an art and can sometimes take us days to finish. It’s an enormous collaboration involving the Chef, myself and others.
Why is menu creation so involved? We have to take a number of variables into consideration, like seasonality (i.e. using a tomato in winter is a definite no-no), and we have to adapt our culinary training and upbringing to the tastes and local dishes of our location, as English food wouldn’t really be well understood or accepted here in the South.
On top of all this we have to think about the taste: does it need sweetness? does it need acid? Finally we take texture into consideration; a crunch really can elevate a dish that is missing that little something.
So the menu is written! What happens next? That’s the fun part of being a chef! Now we have to make sure it all tastes good and works in the way we envision, tweak it here and there and perfect it before it gets to you the customer, our best and biggest critic!