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.

I rather like descriptions like that, it makes me feel fancy even if it is putting the wanky into swanky.

The menu in my husbands work this week offered..... "a pita bread caressed with onion chutney" CARESSED!!!?????

I have a really good book called "The Cook's Book". It's mostly full of really useful things like making sauces, roasting various meats and poultry/game/seafood, cooking vegetables, as well as baking/desserts chapters.
The second chapter was dedicated to foams. It was written by the bloke who invented them. Every recipe was prefaced by stating how many "chargers" your foam siphon needed.
It's a really odd chapter considering how useful the other ones are.

The first time I ever went to a posh restaurant with every ingredient listed I was so disappointed. Sounded like a good feed, but came out absolutely tiny. I realised then that it wasn't going to be for me.

I have never had a deconstructed food item that tasted as good as the constructed one. Why bother if it's worse?

Mostly I just want enough food tbh - and - ON A PLATE. No fucking wooden boards/slates/slapped on the bare table bollocks. A. Plate.

@nokidshere

*I really dislike the current trend for listing ingredients instead of a dish.

Lamb, potatoes, mint, celariac - sounds more like a shopping list than a meal*

I'm a chef and I much prefer this way of describing a dish on a menu. I would love if my place of work adopted this style. Some of the poncy descriptions of our dishes on the menu are toe curlingly cringe. Such and such 'enveloped' in this or 'drizzled' in that. In our case, it's front of house who insist on such nonsense. I'd rather be direct and tell the customer what is on their plate and which flavours to expect.

I go to a Michelin starred restaurant with my friend as often as we can, sometimes only once a year, BUT, it's really not wanky or pretentious at all.
They tell you what the food is, will happily answer questions and make you feel as comfortable as if you were in your local, whilst simultaneously making you feel like the most special people there.
Posh/fancy doesn't always mean pretentious.
My friend and I also quite happily eat Macca's, shop at Asda, use jar sauces on occasion etc.

I agree with PP I want my food on a plate or in a bowl , I dont mind cheese on a board if its served instead of or after the dessert .

The whole foam thing seems to of gone flat around here now thank god but now instead loads of things are called DIRTY , who the bloody hell wants a dirty burger / sandwich / pie .
It always makes me thing they have dropped it on the floor picked it up and flung it back on my slate / lump of wood / piece of glass .

Tere is a local cafe that has a sign in the window saying ' we now sell hot crispy chips' ,, ,, well now isn't that a good idea , better than the cold soggy ones you must of been selling before .

Jewelled food. Just wtf is this wankery?
Food on slates and drinks in old jars with paper straws.
Ugh!
Not to mention the inflated egos prices and underpaid staff

Tere is a local cafe ??? there is a local cafe !

It's called marketing hun

Marketing to make the dish seem a lot more interesting
As well as showcasing local produce or organic where possible

“Dirty” is probably similar to “cheeky”, ie implying that it’s “unhealthy”/“naughty”/shouldn’t really be having it seeing that clean/healthy eating (mainly of salads and vegan stuff) is the current trend.
It’s all wanky.

There’s a thread in classics that’s similar to this one.

I haven’t been to anywhere particularly wanky. Some places have stated prices without the pound sign eg “6” “13.5” etc, but nothing worse than that. I’ve probably seen some wanky descriptions but my eyes just gloss over them.

I hope it wouldn't derail the thread to much to mention wanky menus!

I recently dined at a renovated restaurant, which proudly proclaimed that they had recycled the old 400-year-old floorboards into menu boards. The paper menu was attached by bulldog clip to about a foot and a half of old floorboard, almost an inch thick, and so heavy I almost dropped it when the waitress handed it to me.

Oddly enough I couldn't find anything I really fancied in their three pages of pretensious bollocks.

@Angelf1sh

Regular (medium) and small fries are different portion sizes. That's why they're listed like they are; a small is what you'd get in a happy meal (so in the paper bag) and a medium (regular) is the middle size and comes in a cardboard fry wrapper.

But if I'm already a customer, ready to order I don't want or need to be marketed to. I want to be able to understand what I'm about to order, whether it will be edible, and whether I need to have a cooked meal beforehand/afterward to feel full! (Not that I still resent the Christmas dinner which cost me £45, tasted naff and was gone in 2 bites! )

Give me big portions of identifiable food any day. I've been to a local, trying to be posh restaurant. 3 tiny, dissappointing courses which costs triple the price of other restaurants. From one extreme to the other...here's the menu of one my favourites cheap places. I actually know what I'm getting...and it's never the sugar donut burger

But if I'm already a customer, ready to order I don't want or need to be marketed to.

If that were true, the wait staff wouldn't continue being nice to you after the meal. They'd just tell you to hurry up and get the fuck out as soon as you paid the bill.

You're always being marketed to!

@Thespidersankles

But it tells you nothing about what you are eating, just what was bought.

Roast rump of lamb served with sauté potatoes and celariac mash sounds so much nicer. I don't want the server at my table for 10 minutes having to describe it or telling me where it came from, or me having to ask how it's cooked.

And plates only.

@QuestionableMouse, yet every time I say “small”, I am “corrected” with the word “regular”. Same as places like Starbucks, they don’t have a small, they have a regular and a big.

Well “Grande” anyway

What is this explaining the ‘concept’ guff? Thankfully that hasn’t caught on where I live. It sounds painful 😖

pan fried annoys me. What else would you fry it in?

A deep fat fryer?

Bloody he'll OP it's obvious-

Carrot soup - £2.95
Carot veloute - £7.50

Fish and chips -£7.95
Beer battered poisson de la mer with thrice cooked chipped Maris piper £19.95

Apple crumble and custard £4.95
Rich orchard grown golden caramelised apples with a crunchy topping basking in crime anglais £47.92

😋 you're welcome 😉

See, to me that’s just accurately describing the food.

Jus is much thinner than gravy, often more of a broth. If you call it gravy you’ll get some disappointed diners who expected a thick gravy to pour over their food.

Creme anglaise is much the same. Done right it’s a sauce, and a lot of people think of something much thicker when they think of custard. More of a side to their crumble than a thin light sauce to pour over.

Carrot veloute is a traditional French dish, made from a cream sauce base (so not a standard carrot soup recipe). It’s not pretentious to call it by its name, anymore than it’s pretentious to call a croissant a croissant and not a ‘crescent shaped pastry’.

Don’t underestimate what a pain in the ass customers can be. There are still plenty of people in the UK used to eating very bland boring food, and they will send back something like apple crumble because it’s really flavoursome and not the boiled apple and floury crumble slop they’re used to. Anything restaurants can do to signal that a dish has strong flavours helps them cut down on waste.