A Bone To Pick: The Pen is Mightier than the Plate
Enough with the adjectives
Happy Monday Saucers, I hope your week has started swimmingly. One of the most amazing things to hear is when someone has come across The Bristol Sauce because someone else recommended it. This is a relatively common occurrence — a large part of our growth as a publication has been from word of mouth. I understand that not everyone can afford to support us financially — that’s why we put so little of our content behind a paywall as I want it to be accessible — but for those that enjoy reading our work, if there is someone you can recommend us to, or share a link with, that helps enormously. Thank you! Meanwhile, enjoy this Bone to Pick from a new writer, Katie.
That will be just the job, I thought, eyeing up a mountain of lentil salad: fresh and light to counteract the heatwave. I’d come to the Bath Saturday farmers’ market to shop for a picnic and was all set to order a large portion, until I noticed the label over the bowl. ‘Unctuous’. The ick washed over me, the smug and ingratiating connotations of the word hanging heavily, taunting my hunger. What I had imagined as a crisp, balanced dressing now clung in thick droplets, cloying, viscous and quite off-putting.
Needless to say, I did not order the salad. I did, however, add unctuous to the list of Bad Adjectives Used in Menus: an increasingly large collection of descriptors that have stopped me ordering dishes.
Joining unctuous is succulent, which holds the additional accolade of dissuading me from staying in the establishment at all (see also: juicy). Staking their claim are fresh and house-made, rather stating the obvious: it’s what I’ve come to your restaurant for after all. Noah’s risks slipping into this trap; delicious, fresh and crisp feature on the menu more than once, and despite knowing this to be true about their food I still resent reading it.
An honourable mention must go to rich and indulgent, which when applied to a dessert immediately make me worry about a version of the pudding that may not be so, and conjure memories of the underwhelming chocolate fudge cake so abundant on the early noughties’ menus of my childhood, the ice cream (vanilla, of course) never quite extending the full length of dessert, leaving that lonely dry mouthful at the end. And let’s not get started on unnecessarily complicated synonyms — if I had any doubts about your crème brûlée, describing it as ambrosial has definitely not allayed them.
Any adjective begs the question: why try so hard to convince me that the dish is worth eating? Surely that must mean restaurateurs are worried the food might not be enjoyed and that’s certainly not a risk I’m willing to take. Or even worse, are they trying to tell me what to think about their food before I’ve tried it? How very presumptuous!
A well-written menu is an underrated thing. It must strike a fine balance between simply listing the components of a dish and over-selling with superfluous adjectives —it should leave you intrigued by and excited about the dish you choose to order.
Despite a few recent encounters, Bristol’s independent scene has mostly struck the balance: menus that show the chefs take their food seriously whilst allowing the diner to enjoy the meal without pre-conceived notions dictated by their description. Ragù’s inimitable tiramisu — which has somewhat of a cult following — is the perfect example. Listed simply as ‘Tiramisu, orange, nutmeg, cocoa’, it piques interest. How have they added the orange: peel or juice? Will it overpower the delicate creaminess, how will the nutmeg complement the richness of the cocoa? By the time it is served you are so captivated that all thoughts of sharing your pudding are forgotten. Any resulting frostiness with your aspiring pudding-partners is worth the enjoyment of each mouthful of cocoa-tinted, delicately spiced, intense yet mellow dessert; better than any notional version created whilst waiting. But here’s the irony: if the tiramisu was described like that on the menu, I’d give it a wide berth.
So, a plea to all those writing menus: keep it simple. Let your food do the talking.
All words by Katie Hobhouse, photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
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