Menu Language

One of the things that stood out the most for me in the readings was the point in the study about the menu register that some restaurants purposely word their menus in ways that people will probably not understand what everything means. I thought the restaurant in Ohio that put the menu entirely in French was especially surprising. I have been to a lot of restaurants where the waiters encourage you to ask them questions about the menu if there is some ingredient or preparation method that you do not understand. For example, a lot of restaurants use an unusual name for some type of green that has a more common name that people are more likely to recognize. I think two reasons that they do this might be to make the food seem more rare and specialized than other restaurants and also to let the waiter describe a menu item in a way that is more descriptive and appealing than a menu would have room to print. Also, if the customer feels that they have a personal relationship with the waiter, they might be more likely to remember the restaurant and come back or tell their friends about it. 

Another thing I haven notices about menus is that some kinds of restaurants have much longer and more extensive menus than others. For example, French menus tend to have only a few appetizers and entrees while Chinese restaurants usually have so many options that I wonder if it's even possible to make that many dishes. Also, Chinese menus and menus in restaurants with other types of Asian food usually divide items by what type of meat they are made with or if they are vegetarian while in French and Italian menus all of the entrees are put in one category. I am not sure whether this only applies for these kinds of restaurants in America or if these traditions are from the actual countries. Also, in France, what we think of as appetizers are called entrees and what we think of as entrees are called plats.