I’ve become a little afraid of being asked by a waiter, “Have you ever eaten together before?” Not because I feel uncomfortable being new or would feel insulted if they didn’t recognize me from a previous dinner, but because I know my answer doesn’t matter. This is not a real question, but a prelude to a boilerplate speech about every dish on the menu.
This is boring enough when the menu is said to be arranged in order from smallest to largest. But recently, Eater staffers and restaurant patrons I spoke to noticed that lengthy descriptions of dishes were now part of the menu. The friendly idea of pointing out a few can’t-miss dishes to customers before they order is basically like a restaurant instructing servers to read the entire menu aloud and give an accurate description of each item. became.
At one restaurant,[the server] We explained the sections and their composition and then ate some dishes. “Even though four out of five people told us they’d been there before,” says editor Lauren Salyer. Eater SF. Another colleague said a recent server was meticulously explaining his first two sections of the menu “as if he were practicing a monologue.” Overall, friends and colleagues agree that overly explained menus are occurring more frequently, leaning from helpful context to redundant lectures.
I go to restaurants far more than the average American. Maybe I’m just experiencing something that is actually useful to the majority of diners and has been developed to improve their restaurant experience. After all, a restaurant can’t expect all guests to research the menu in advance. This is hospitality. Background and education can make a difference in your diet. Restaurants are trying to figure out how much is just right.
“We don’t necessarily list every ingredient on the dish, but we like to explain how the ingredients come together,” says general manager Martin Montgomery. progressis San Francisco’s “New California” restaurant, focusing on seasonal ingredients and flavors from the city’s diverse communities. A menu may list several ingredients, but when describing a dish to diners, servers talk about flavors, textures, and how those ingredients interact.
If you’ve ever attended a tasting menu (or just watched the “Fork” episode of the show) bear), this style of service may seem familiar. At these ultra-fine restaurants, dining is an experience, sometimes without a physical menu, and it’s up to the server to figure out what the customer is about to eat. But this kind of intimate, complex communication also pervades restaurants with a la carte service and a much more casual atmosphere, and importantly, it’s done before anyone orders, so I think “That’s what the menu is for,” he exclaimed. ! ” It’s like a hungry Don Draper.
At Progress, servers are encouraged to use adjectives and emotional words to describe the experience diners would have while eating, say, a winter citrus salad or brown butter seaweed noodles. The idea is that even if there are unfamiliar elements to a dish, by associating it with an emotion, “it’s easier for guests to understand and set expectations than just talking about what a particular ingredient is.” “become,” says Montgomery.
Of course, setting dinner expectations is an important element of hospitality. And often this information is really useful. The menu may list your favorite ingredients, but if your server tells you it’s shaped like aspic, you’ll be more inclined to order something else. But this style of service risks imposing a fine-dining feel where it’s not needed, pausing conversation and flirtation to make speeches, and leaving diners waiting impatiently for the server to finish it. .
“It can be a nuisance, right? Like, if you’re just sitting with your friends, you don’t want to make a fuss,” says owner Adam Gersten. New Schnitzel House In Miami. But for him, he feels that such involvement and explanation from servers is needed now more than ever, primarily for reasons of cost. As eating out becomes more and more expensive, there is a need to explain where the ingredients come from, the history of the dish and how the chef thought about it, Gersten said. “If you have a conscience and you’re trying to extort people’s money, you want to be held accountable for what you’ve done here,” he says. “Why is this like this and why can’t you get it at Wendy’s?”
Montgomery and Gersten also acknowledge that the average customer is far more knowledgeable about food than they were 10 to 20 years ago, and they often ask questions about how food is prepared and sourced. Ideally, the server would read the room and figure out who wants to hear more and who just wants to be left alone. Ideally. Perhaps the problem is that you hardly notice it when it’s working. There’s a refreshing explanation when the server welcomes the party, and the server may be down before you can react. But when it doesn’t work, you realize it, and it’s excruciating. If it doesn’t work, you’ll see a string. The whole show is an attempt to convince you that this is a special experience and worth every penny before you experience it.
The other night I went to a new restaurant thinking I would have a spree on the menu like I have eaten at other restaurants run by the same group. I was going to try my usual tactic of nodding vigorously in the hope that the server would pick up the message and speed things up. Instead, there is nothing.Well, not really there is nothing, But it’s a welcome limitation. The anticipation of each dish arriving, along with a brief explanation, was palpable just before the plates arrived. Instead of asking for details in advance about what I was eating, I had to figure out for myself how the flavors listed on the menu would appear or interact with each other. It’s not inherently a better way to eat. However, I would like to use this option more often.