Go for dinner to a high-end five-star restaurant or even a standalone with a fancy pedigree and even fancier prices, and the menu will have dishes with such elaborate descriptions that it almost needs a translator to decipher what it is. For instance, ?Russet Potato Mousselin Infused with Organic Farm Fresh Egg, Shaved Celery and Ground Mustard? sounds quite exotic, but actually is no different from the potato salad your mother makes at home. Another dish could read: ?Wild Fujian albacore sashimi with pea tendril salad, toasted hazelnuts, garlic chips, scallions and melon cilantro vinaigrette? roughly translated into sashimi rolls with a flavoured dressing. Even your regular Caesar?s Salad now will say ?Caesar Salad with shaved Parmesano Reggiano and garlic croutons?. Then there?s another favourite: ?Grilled lamb Cotelettes with Caramelised Apricots, Apricot Agri-doux, Glazed Couscous, Ginger Infused Apricot Puree, Asparagus Tips and Red Wine Jus?. It?s basically grilled lamb chops with apricot couscous, sauce and asparagus tips.
You need to be a linguist to decipher the language of menus, or you could buy a copy of Dan Jurafsky?s The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. A Stanford professor, Jurafsky describes how he and some colleagues analysed a database of 6,500 restaurant menus describing 650,000 dishes. Among their findings: fancy restaurants, not surprisingly, use fancier?and longer?words than cheaper restaurants do. Jurafsky writes that ?every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 69 cents in the price of that dish?. Compared with inexpensive restaurants, the expensive ones are ?three times less likely to talk about the diner?s choice? and ?seven times more likely to talk about the chef?s choice?.
Lower-priced restaurants, meanwhile, rely on ?linguistic fillers?. These are subjective words like delicious, flaky and fluffy which Jurafsky calls ?status anxiety? words. Fancy restaurants also add much more elements of provenance to descriptions of ingredients as in Parmiggia Reggiano (Parma ham), Kobe Beef, Boston Crabs, Island Creek oysters or Maine Lobsters. According to Jurafsky, very expensive restaurants ?mention the origins of the food more than 15 times as often as regular restaurants?. Now, expensive restaurants are tarting up ordinary working-class dishes like hamburgers and pizzas, mixing in delicacies like truffles or lobster. In such places, says the book, burgers are served not on ?buns?, but on ?artisan rolls?, and the side dish will include ?vine-ripened tomatoes? and ?Pommes Frites?, and not the more common ?potato chips?. It’s just a way for the rich to feel different, says Jurafsky.