So, what you’re saying is, your kitchen staff wandered into a forest this morning and picked these mushrooms? No? OK then, farmers or actual agricultural workers picked them. Just like they pick all mushrooms that end up in all restaurants. Not all restaurants feel the need to label them “foraged.”
Good, concerned citizens must run this restaurant. They use sustainable practices to get their eggs. Hold on. Sustainable for whom? Are their practices sustainable for the environment, or maybe just sustainable for the restaurant owner’s pocketbook?
It must be wholesome and made completely from scratch if it’s homemade, right? Sometimes. But is it made in the restaurant? Is that the “home” to which the menu is referring? Or is the chef making these at his or her own personal home, where nobody is monitoring the sanitation? Uh oh! And when you see this term on a menu at a chain restaurant, it only reminds you that everything else is not homemade. Gulp…what does that mean?
Then there’s handmade. Why does a restaurant even have to say that something is handmade? Pointing that out just reminds you that there might be robots back there assembling your salad. Now you’re concerned.
You’re seeing the market salad, or the market soup, or the market berry dessert. Is the restaurant looking for some award for getting their ingredients at a market? You didn’t think they were going to Sam’s Club. Maybe you should now.
The signature dish of the restaurant must be the best, right? Signature probably means that that dish is what the restaurant is known for. Or wait…maybe it simply means somebody created this recipe specifically for the restaurant. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good.
It hadn’t occurred to you that there were different grades of cheddar cheese, but apparently this one dish comes with “premium” cheddar cheese. Does that mean the cows are grass-fed that produce it? Does that mean the other items on the menu have some inferior cheese? No way to know. Either way, you’re getting that premium cheese — and paying for it.
The menu says a sauce has truffles, white wine and essence of lemon. Essence? So, will the sauce just remind you of lemon in some way without actually containing lemon? Did the chef do a lemon prayer over the sauce? Is there or is there not lemon in this thing?
It seems every sandwich shop now uses artisanal bread. You imagine maybe they get the bread from some bearded man with an indecipherable accent in a little cabin on a mountain, and all he does is make bread. Yes. That must be it. Or does it just mean it’s made locally? Or does it mean something about ingredients? Or method? Made local doesn’t necessarily mean tastier. The baguette sounds tasty. Can’t you just get that?
If an Italian restaurant doesn’t state that its sauces are made in the traditional style, then that restaurant has not gotten with the program. But usually this word is applied to something that isn’t that complicated. How is a traditional tomato sauce different from a non-traditional one? Does the cook just, like, intentionally take four more hours to make it?
A deconstructed Caesar salad is basically a head of romaine lettuce, un-chopped, and a bowl of dressing next to it. An unconstructed burger is a patty with some vegetables and buns sprawled out on the plate. Basically you’re paying more for the restaurant to do less, is that it?
Farm-to-table once meant you ate at a restaurant literally on or right next to a farm, and all of your food came from said farm. But today, restaurants in the middle of cities us the words farm-to-table in their menus. Don’t they mean farm-to-truck-to-table?
Somebody please finally explain. Are you allowed to order antipasto if you’re not eating pasta? Is it even related to pasta? Is it the opposite of pasta (because of the anti?)
“Harvested” is sort of like “foraged.” You know that your vegetables were, at some point, harvested. Is this restaurant claiming to have harvested them themselves? There is no garden in the waiting area.
So what the restaurant is saying is that somebody, somewhere, at sometime selected the food on your plate. No kidding. Unless they mean these string beans were hand-selected by God (which is an entirely different conversation) why are they telling us this?
