Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Five ways to make an impressive sounding menu

OK, this post is aimed at anyone out there who might be running a cafe or restaurant. This is not about how to cook an impressive sounding menu, but how to write an impressive sounding menu. How to describe the dishes so that any foodie will be salivating and not able to resist ordering that delicious sounding dish (note, it is a delicious sounding dish, not necessarily a delicious tasting dish!).

Here we go:

1. Method: refer to the manner in which the dish was cooked - add the words "pan fried" or "oven roasted" or "lightly seared" or "char grilled".

2. Place: refer to the geographical location from which the food emanated - try "Tasmanian salmon" or "Western Australian angus beef" .

3. Fed: refer to the manner in which the original animal was fed - "grain fed beef" or "corn fed chicken" or "milk fed veal".

4. Jus: give it some "jus" (i.e. a posh word for sauce!) - try "Cranberry jus" or "herb jus" or "red wine jus".

5. Bed: refer to a particular "bed" on which the main food item can rest - "a bed of rocket" or "a bed of spring greens" or "a bed of kumara" or "a bed of lettuce".

Add all these ingredients together and you get a scrumptious sounding gourmet (if not somewhat pretentious) treat. Try this:- Oven roasted grass fed lamb with a rosemary infused Barossa muscat jus served on a bed of grilled eggplant.

2 comments:

Guthers said...

Don't go too crazy on the fancy words either. If I can't work out what it is, I'm not going to order it!

Nixter said...

I love it. I just read it out to a girl in the office - she loved it too and said it was vry true!