To be irritated by wanky and pretentious restaurant terminology?

[ManicUnicorn]

I should start by saying I love food and eating out, it's one of life's great pleasures IMO. But I'm finding myself increasingly irritated by restaurants using pretentious and fancy names for stuff and trying to dress things up as more exotic than they actually are.

A new restaurant has just opened here and I was looking at their Christmas menu earlier, and amongst lots of the wankery on there one of the deserts really stood out 'Rich orchard apples in crumble with creme anglais'... so that'll be apple crumble and custard then? Why not just say what it is? A hearty and much loved traditional British pudding that's been enjoyed for years, you don't need to dress it up as anything else! Oh and there's so much 'jus' on there as well, it's just fucking gravy for Christ's sake!

It reminds me of when I went out for a Christmas meal a few years ago. Set menu, and were all wondering what the hell one the starters was. Someone googled it and guess what? It was just a fancy name for soup.

I don't know if I'm just a bit common but I think there's something so pretentious about this kind of thing. Food is food at the end of the day.

Sauté means jump and indicates food - eg onions, potatoes - generally in small pieces - tossed and fried fast on a high heat.

Not the same as pan-fried which is generally for pieces of meat/fish where it will sit in the pan and cook more slowly.

Deep-fried is different again obviously.

So that's just an apple then.

No love. As others have patiently explained, slaw is shredded veg. Unspecified. Apple slaw will mean it has apple in it. Not just Apple. Coleslaw means it has cabbage in it.

I quite like to know if the side salad on my dish is going to be appley or cabbagey.

sash I agree with you on ravioli having filling on the inside, but ravioli, like panini is plural.

That's exactly what I was saying, this was a single bit of 'filling' between 2 pieces of pasta ie a raviolo.

And don't get me started on Gordon Ramsey of masterchef USA (and junior) he knows better than to say raviolis, and the kids who say their parents are Italian should also know better.

Love junior masterchef until the kids cook raviolis.

As for all the wanky flowery language, I blame Marks and Spencer, "this is not just a ..."

I'm guessing the people on here protesting about the correct culinary terms being used on menus don't cook from scratch much themselves.

Health permitting I do cook from scratch, I've been known to cook five course meals. Before cooking I shop, I don't 'source' ingredients.

Pickled veg - nope it's not pickled, you put it in vinegar for 5 mins, my pickles are in jars and need a few weeks to cure.

I also think the wankery is talking down to people, if I eat in the chippy in town I know the only sauce on offer is tomato ketchup out of a bottle the chippy has bought in.

If I'm in a Michelin starred restaurant I expect any tomato sauce to be made on site with tomatoes.

Could you rustle up a Eaton un mess too?

Yes and I will serve it on a piece of unwashed groundsheet torn from a cub scout's tent.

Surely an Eton un mess is a pavlova.

A de constructed Pavalova

'Yes and I will serve it on a piece of unwashed groundsheet torn from a cub scout's tent.'

You know I would actually prefer this to

Said piece of locally sourced slate

Hand blown glass curve

Sustainable copper Mini saucepanette

Organic plant pot

Lump of tree from local habitat

A de constructed Pavalova

Similar to the deconstructed Eton mess but you have to peel you own kiwi fruit and the dessert is served suggestively in a pair of men's underpants.

@SteamTrainsRealAleandOpenFires oh believe me I get it you're making a show of yourself, easy know you don't cook

I'm a horrifically bad cook so pretty much hate talking food

Talking food would freak me out no end

Ooh I quite like a bit of pretentious wankery on menus. But then I live in a town where chicken goujons seem to be the height of haute cuisine so it lifts my heart when I see 'beef, carrots, potato 20' cause you know it's probably going to be nice.

Provenance is important though.

If the menu doesn't state that meat is locally sourced and free range, I'm going to assume it isn't, and choose something else to eat.

Same with fish. I'll look for line caught or hand-dived scallops on a menu. Because some fishing practices are horribly damaging to the environment.

@nottodaydear Mark E Smith And the Fall menu.. .just brilliant!! Also, I can't bring myself to order anything involving chocolate soil. It just sounds poo related and grubby somehow...although maybe it's a natural by-product from arse cutting the chips!!!? Like a fine dusting of bottom skin perhaps?

@grumiosmum exactly! Thank you. How are we supposed to know if we're paying €15 for a breaded fish fillet from a box thrown into the oven or a fresh piece of hake battered in house cooked properly/carefully

Likewise a burger, I'd rather know if it's a '8oz local farm homemade burger with all the local trimmings' or if it's just 'beef burger'

The one that really annoys me is ‘crispy bacon’. It seems that this is just an automatic epithet for bacon. Crispy. Never fucking is, is it? Oh, we’ve got bacon on the menu, we must call is crispy, then wave it at a heat source until the meat is barely cooked and the fat sublimely white and flabby. Yuck yuck yuck. Make it actually fucking crispy, bacon or streaky, smoked or not, it’s the food of the deities.

I don’t like those ‘chicken, parsnip, lemon’ menus. Partly because they don’t sound appetising, but mostly becaus DH can read them without losing interest part way through. Anything longer, he gives up, and I have the amusement of telling him what he’s eating, because he got as far as ‘pan-fried duck breast’, got bored and ordered it regardless.

A Manchester restaurant serving a Fall menu? That's wanky in itself!

Not if it’s Chez Mark E Smith

You might be onto something here. It could be called Eat Y'Self Fitter, but every dish would have to contain beer.

Every year the lovely ladies in my office opt to have our Christmas meal somewhere like this. I have to google translate the whole bloody menu to see if there is anything relatively normal for me to eat. I'm just not used to fancy food and hate sauce on everything. Least it's only once a year though.

Soils, smears and foams; none of them should be on a plate intentionally. Repellent.

If the menu doesn't state that meat is locally sourced and free range, I'm going to assume it isn't I'm still a bit skeptical about whether it is!

This weekend at a restaurant I had Scottish salmon fillet arranged on crushed new potatoes and NAPPIED with a butter tarragon sauce, that’s not a culinary term I’ve heard before and it doesn’t sound very appetising. The sauce was just poured over the salmon!

Nappe is a french term for a sauce of a particular consistency. Nappied is a baby's bum. Its just a sauce.

Rarfy

For my 50th I went to Adam's in Birmingham, which is lovely (and has a michelin star) but my carer/friend has some huge food issues so we had an email correspondence over a couple of weeks, they created a menu for him.

When we got there he was presented with his own menu, the menu I ate off was in plain English.

This is a place that could be as wanky as they like but aren't. It might be worth you contacting the wanky place beforehand and asking them to do something for you.

But I still drool dream about the deconstructed Pimms dessert I had once

I read that as Primula dessert