Edibility Gap

Mashed potatoes (whiter than Snow White claims to be) in a rosebud border, green (with envy because they never get top billing) sugar peas plus a fat and sassy mushroom or two, French fried onion rings that speak for themselves, and a chopped green salad for your vitamin quotient.

--Creighton's Restaurant Fort Lauderdale

Gourmetburger--embosomed with firm lush Bernaise [sic] sauce and necklaced with a Frenchly fried onion ring--garni of De Gaulle lemon slices--voil`a!

--Hippo, San Francisco

Emerald Isle--sure and it warms the cockles of your heart! A wallop of ice cream, a dollop of fudge sauce, a flurry of mint and cocoanut, a halo of whipped cream.

--Blum's, New York

Originally a means of communication between kitchen and customer, the menu has become marinated, garnished, overstuffed, embosomed with verbiage and necklaced with adjectives. It is now characterized, to borrow a phrase from the Forum of the Twelve Caesars in New York, by "a Rising Crown of Pate and Triumphal Laurel Wreath." In other words, it is meaningless.

Where once the good, honest words "roast beef" sufficed, restaurateurs now add something like "blue-ribbon beef, thick and juicy." Diners know from experience that the steer got nowhere near a blue ribbon until it was served with a bottle of Pabst. From coast to coast, mashed potatoes appear on menus as "snowflake, creamery-whipped potatoes"; all vegetables, whether frozen, canned or left over from yesterday, are called "garden fresh." In Minneapolis, broiled rock lobster tails turn into "Queen of Hearts"; in Los Angeles, capon becomes "Tower of London"; in New York, string beans metamorphose into "Long Johns." The Hawaiian Hut in Portland, Me., offers its Special Tiki Chicken on this verbal platter: "Truly a dish fit for the gods--beyond description." But any diner could describe it easily--chicken with bean sprouts.

Please Order. Why all the preposterous euphemism? One reason is the inarticulate waiter. Until the early 1960s, he knew food almost as well as the maitre d' and used his knowledge to good effect. If the restaurateur wanted to push calf's liver one day, he simply told his men, and they went among the tables and sold calf's liver. But now, "the biggest and most persistent problem in the industry is the dearth of good, experienced waiters," says Joe Baum, vice president of Manhattan's Restaurant Associates Industries, Inc. (Four Seasons, La Fonda del Sol).

Clarence Hewes, head of Chicago's Bell Printing Co., whose presses churn out menus for 160 restaurants per day, has another theory. He blames the shortage of skilled, versatile chefs and the rising cost of food, which have forced restaurants everywhere to shorten their menus. "The less you offer, the more you have to say about it," says Hewes. Mon Petit, a restaurant in Chicago, devotes a three-line historical note to Chateaubriand beneath the dish named after the 19th century French statesman.

"A menu should not merely list food," says Denis O'Sullivan, a vice president of the New York printing firm of B. R. Doerfler, which turns out menus for 625 different restaurants. "It should be a front-line salesman." Bold typography, two-color art work, odd shapes (a coffee mug, the state of Texas), and archaic or arcane spellings ("Chef's Sallet," "Stake wyth Asparagus," "Colde Lobfter") all provoke the diner's eye into paying attention to the day's specials. The most honest and sardonic sell of all is practiced by the Brookline, Mass., delicatessen of Jack & Marion's. Several of the 345 dishes on the overwhelming (25-in. by 36-in.) card carry a star to indicate "a good profit item for Jack & Marion's. Please order."

No Shakespeare. "The funny, far-out menu is a must these days," states Manhattan Restaurateur Shelly Fireman. "The majority of people who dine out are bored with each other and need something to break down the barriers. A way-out menu gives them something to talk about." Alas, the wit is insipid. Along with the "martini-bopper's special," Fireman's own Tin Lizzie restaurant revels in marginalia: "Sit down in our barber chair and enjoy the last living 5-c- shoeshine, done with real champagne." Minneapolis' Cork & Fork follows each listing with an entry like "Lionel Barrymore, on one of his many visits to the Cork & Fork before it was opened, was once heard to remark, in his off-the-cuff style of humor: 'Say, this is good.' " And the menu of San Francisco's Senor Pico describes one bestseller (beef stew) with this line: "It's a real son of a bitch."

Who writes menus? Mainly the restaurateurs or their chefs, but sometimes the printing companies lend an inky hand. "We do the job," says, Jack Loftin of the Dallas printing firm of Menus Distinctive. "There's nothing to be ashamed about." Unashamed, a small band of professional writers hangs around the kitchen door. One freelancer, Barry Tarshis, who dubs himself the "Menu Surgeon," says: "A menu should relate logically to the restaurant. A whimsical menu for the hip crowd, for example, or a folksy menu for the family crowd. But if someone wants something really offbeat, I might even suggest a baroque menu for a truly rundown place."

Freddy Style. Menu writers seem to spend most of their time peering over each other's shoulders. Punctuation is repetitive, leading to this law: The quality of food in a restaurant is in inverse proportion to the number of semicolons and exclamation marks on the menu.

The unfortunate phrase "finger-lickin' good," once confined to chicken in the South, now appears in Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Buffalo, El Paso. All too often, sea food is now headlined: "Denizens of the Deep." Vegetables come from "Field and Forest."

Steak is described with double-barreled words: "piping hot," "whopping big," "hand-carved," and "mouth-waterin'."

The better the restaurant, the less likely it is to play the blurb game. Says Sheldon Tannen of Manhattan's "21":

"Fancy menus just gild the lily. Presentation of food, not descriptive phrases, is what is necessary." Nonetheless, beware the chef's signature. A restaurant in New York's Greenwich Village offers Spaghetti Alfredo, which turns out to have nothing to do with the restaurant of the same name in Rome. In stead, as the menu footnotes, it is "Spaghetti--Freddy style." Gallatin Powers, owner of Gallatin's restaurant in Monterey, Calif:, explains the genesis of the chicken, orange juice, and ginger concoction he calls Poulet Albert simply: "I have a son named Albert."

Paradoxically, the ultimate is the talking menu. Instead of relying on the nonsensical literary sell, a waiter recites what the chef will offer that day. All very well; if the diner is not familiar with a dish, he has merely to inquire. However, in a few fancy restaurants, the answer is chillingly familiar. "This, monsieur, is a delicate blend of exotic ingredients ..."

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