Nosh Pit

Mystery Menus

Would it kill restaurants to, I don’t know…use their menus to describe dishes? Apparently yes.

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Mar 05, 2012 at 10:30AM 5 Comments

Sitka and Spruce’s menu, up for interpretation.

The fashion now in dining rooms is menu minimalism: Descriptions that may (or may not) list ingredients, but coyly withhold the preparation details diners might reasonably deem critical to their selection—or leave undefined arcane terms even diehard foodies might not know.

Yes readers, I have pointed this out before. The way La Bete offered Manila clams with gnocchi and aromatics without specifying that it was a stew, not a bowl of clams-in-shell. Tilth does it every time it lists its citrus brulee on its brunch card, amplifying that meaningless description only with “arugula, tarragon, Holmquist hazelnut.” (FYI, it’s caramelized orange slices with herbed greens, and if it’s on the menu you should order it: it’s really stunning.) Sitka and Spruce is an old hand at the cryptic treatment, peddling such mysteries as lamb manti and ful madams without a whisper of explanation. And LloydMartin: Shouldn’t a diner be granted the intelligence that “rabbit, sweet potato veloute, chestnut, Italian porcini” is a pasta dish?

I figured these Hemingwaylike descriptions might be a pendulum-swing from the days when menus were lampooned for a level of detail so Faulknerian, they read pretentious. Some chefs might be humbly keeping preparation descriptors low so as to forefront the primacy of the ingredient. Or maybe, to the contrary, they’re a chef’s not-so-humble way of suggesting that he should be trusted to wrest greatness from these ingredients—nevermind the details.
Now this just in from LloydMartin chef and owner, Sam Crannell: “We definitely list the main product in each dish, but we don’t want the descriptions to be too long,” he told me last week. “The way we do it opens up the ability to have a friendly conversation with the waitstaff. We don’t want to toy with guests, but we do want to encourage those conversations.”

Nothing personal, Sam, but to this guest’s mind, ordering already presents enough of a challenge. Sure, it’s not brain surgery. But between the demands of a table’s dietary restrictions and desire for variety—not to mention an individual’s cravings—diners work to come up with the orders they’ll be paying for. Seizing a waiter’s undivided attention to get the simple descriptive basics in the thick of the dinner hour so that waiter can properly “sell” us a dish should not be a diner’s responsibility—and, unless restaurants get staffed up with considerably more waiters, should not be the only way a diner can find out that there’s pasta in that thar rabbit plate.

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Tags: Menus, Menu Descriptions, Critic's Notebook, Sitka and Spruce, La Bete

Revel Introduces Wintertime Hot Pot

Warm weather grilled meats make way for hot, spicy broth.

Posted by: Allecia Vermillion on Nov 17, 2011 at 11:10AM 0 Comments

The marrow-filled spicy beef hot pot: now warming you up at Revel. Photo courtesy of Rachel Yang.

Revel retired its popular summertime grill shack menu on October 31 (but not before sous chef Mike Whisenhunt went through a reported 18 pigs, four cows, six goats and 12 lambs). This week I happened to eat at the Frank Bruni–favored Fremont restaurant as part of a campaign to impress a friend from out of town, and noticed a new seasonal addition to the menu: Korean hot pots. So stop lamenting the departure of those tasty grilled meats; these bowls are designed to fight off winter’s encroachment with some fiery broth and a tiny ladle.

The spicy beef hot pot contains brisket aplenty, but what you notice first when the bowl arrives at the table are the four caveman-sized discs of bone marrow. According to chef-owner Rachel Yang, each serving comes with four of the behemoth bones. Spooning out the tasty marrow innards is highly encouraged. The hot pot runs $30 and contains Swiss chard and king oyster mushrooms. Two people can share it, but ladling the contents out between three our four people means more room for pancakes, noodles, and dumplings.

The hot and sour shrimp version is $26 and contains the titular shellfish, as well as glass noodles, tofu, daikon, napa cabbage, zucchini and shrimp chips. Vegetarians, don’t be shy: Just ask and Revel will do a vegetarian version.

Yang says the beef hot pot sold out on Tuesday night, its maiden voyage on the menu.

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Tags: Menus, Revel, Rachel Yang

Menu Descriptions that…Aren’t

Beignets with pepitas, Bottarga, and Banyuls, anyone?

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Oct 18, 2010 at 09:00AM 2 Comments

Dined at the new Marjorie recently; noting once again its breezy, angular dissimilarity to its previous incarnation in Belltown. Charming still, with the ever-gracious Donna Moodie hosting masterfully…just no longer oozing that gypsy-trader’s-tent comfort of the former spot, in food or in mood.

Indeed, the food’s admirable but now quite foofy and composed. Not to mention, on the menu, nearly unintelligible. To wit, this menu description: “Squash Beignets with pepitas, Bottarga, Banyuls.”

“Well…I know what beignets are!” ventured one at my table of worldly sophisticates.

Banyuls, I half-knew, was a dessert wine; pepitas the Spanish word for pumpkin seeds. But would Joe Q. Eater know this?

And what the heck was Bottarga?

“Oh, that’s the roe of mullet,” our otherwise very helpful waiter explained, by way of non-explanation.

In fact it’s a sort of poor-man’s caviar, only sun-dried and cured to a substance that can be grated onto dishes for a bit of briny tang. Of course when our waiter described it as roe, I pictured tiny fish eggs.

The point being: We never would have known from either the menu description nor the waiter’s amplification that this beignet dish was in fact more of a frisee salad (beautifully dressed, by the way), scattered with pumpkin seeds and shavings of Bottarga roe, with six sweet squash beignets alongside.

Quite lovely in fact. But would a meaningful description have been so hard for the menu to give us?

We humbly posit that any menu that cares to identify the particular variety of salt crystals crowning its housemade butter—that’ll be Murray River salt, Your Highness—would be much better advised to identify the parts of the meal the vast majority of diners actually care about. And we’re not just talking to you, Marjorie.

Now, if they’d just tell us what cobia was…

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Tags: Menus, Marjorie, Menu Descriptions

Menu Cleverness

Sometimes it works, sometimes it…doesn’t

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on May 26, 2010 at 08:00AM 0 Comments

Menu photos! Why didn’t I think of that?

Just back from lunch at Delicatus where I hoovered a sandwich called, inexplicably, the Mudd Honey.

Creatively-spelled reference to the seminal Seattle grunge band, Mudhoney? Evocation of the muddy-looking goo—horseradish aioli meets barbecue sauce, a not-exactly-inevitable flavor curiosity that was nevertheless oddly alright—oozing from between the flaps of roast beef, turkey, slab bacon, and white cheddar?

Not at all sure…but Delicatus—the only good thing to happen to Pioneer Square in years—is fond of the cutesy nicknamed menu item, as evidenced by sandwiches named the B.L.F-ingT., Fists of Fury, and The Activist. (The last, which includes roasted eggplant, squash, and herbed goat cheese, includes the explanatory caveat: “May feel the urge to tie yourself to a tree.”)

Indeed, most of Delicatus’ sammies feature names that, upon consideration, make a certain kind of goofball sense.

But lately, I’ve been to a bunch of restaurants with menus that don’t. The list at Blueacre, for instance, is divided into categories with headers like The Craggy Moor and The Hunger. Wha…? (The titles appear to signify meat dishes and cooked seafood apps, respectively…but with a breathtaking lack of intuitive sense.) Reminded me of that Wallingford jewel, Joule, whose menu is divided into inexplicable sections like Crisped and Sparked.

All of the above feature thorough dish descriptions, however—which is always critical. Joints that don’t—Wallingford’s Avila, to name one whopping example—will suffer.

Why? Diners want to know what they’re getting. Simple as that.

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Tags: Trends, Trends, Menus