On the Menu by Nicholas Lander

Author:Nicholas Lander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Food
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2016-11-03T12:44:13+00:00

THE EVER-EXPANDING MENU

In outline, at least, today’s menu has barely changed from that which first emerged in Paris over 200 years ago.

It is a single piece of paper with a list of dishes and prices, a bill of fare. And while the style of cooking has changed considerably, the biggest single change has been the figures down the right-hand side of the menu – the prices that are charged today for dinner would in certain instances be enough to buy an entire 19th-century restaurant with change to spare.

Even in its contents, not that much has changed. I don’t believe it would take too long for one of the more revered chefs of yore – Auguste Escoffier or Alexis Soyer, for example – to understand how today’s chefs write their menus and to appreciate the combination of flavours they work so hard to create for their customers’ pleasure.

And yet over the past five years, there has been significant change, not so much in the menu’s overall contents but rather in the make-up of its constituent parts. Today, menus proliferate more than ever before as they become more specialised, more focused on how the customer uses any restaurant at different times of the day and for many different purposes.

This chapter focuses on four different styles of menu, three of which have emerged only recently: the breakfast/brunch menu, the afternoon tea menu and the cocktail menu. The fourth, the separate dessert menu, is more a matter of the restaurateur’s choice, taste and style but one I very much appreciate. As a restaurateur in the 1980s I implemented a separate dessert menu initially for purely personal reasons: as a customer, I much prefer to contemplate my choice of dessert without having to look again at the list of starters and main courses. I quickly appreciated its commercial advantages: it not only boosted sales of desserts and glasses of dessert wine but it also encouraged those in the pastry section, who, by virtue of having their own menu, now stood on a more equal footing with the rest of the kitchen. And perhaps the essential secret of being a successful restaurateur is to look after your staff so that they can, in turn, look after your customers.

The emergence of the other three menus – breakfast/brunch, afternoon tea and cocktail – reflects more the changing rhythms of our working lives and of how we use restaurants. Ten years ago breakfast meetings mainly took place in the US; afternoon tea was only served in the stuffy grandeur of a hotel; and cocktails were far more limited in their range, style and flavour patterns.

These four styles of menu constitute the hitherto unexplored regions of the genre where considerable innovation has been made. Far more, I believe, will follow.

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