What's on the menu?

[JohnM]

Bless the LA lounge folks! The Roederer was first drinks out at 1050 .

 

[blackcat20]

Just because you are not familiar with a term does not make it "wankerish". anat0l beat me to it anyway...

This is taking the piss, right?


The dish is what it is. There's little to no over-inflation here. What's wrong with a bit of old fashioned asking for help? Ego too high?

I don't know what restaurants you go to; certainly I don't go to ones which charge over $300 for dinner, but this menu may have had some things I may not have known right off, but no more (or even less) "pretentious" than most other restaurants on the ground.

I remember only one restaurant (a good one) that had a small glossary at the back of the menu explaining some of the "terms" (or rather, foods and some techniques) that were on offer in the menu.

For the uninitiated:

• Kimchi is Korean spiced pickled cabbage, usually served as a meal accompaniment but can be incorporated into dishes as well
• Casarecce is a type of pasta, shaped like long tubes with a slit throughout their entire length. For this dish, it probably was not important at all to know what the pasta looked like.
• Fontina is a cheese; to be specific, an Italian soft cheese made from cow's milk
• Romesco is a Spanish sauce typically made from nuts and capsicum and traditionally eaten with fish
• Clafoutis is a French baked flan-like cake

So they have decided to put the names of those items on there rather than be long winded and go, for example, "Korean pickled cabbage stew...." etc. etc.. What is so pretentious about that? At least they are not as pretentious as some restaurants now which are really taking the mickey with fancying up their menu items with cooking techniques or terms, some which are (in earnest) completely unnecessary.

A classic one is a Croque Monsieur. To most, that's just a ham and cheese sandwich, although to be brutally thorough, it does, to stick to its original incarnation, need to have both the correct ingredients and technique.

What if we started "de-pretention-ising" dishes that we didn't know or seemed too complicated? Take the Swiss fondue, which is cheese melted into a liquid and typically mixed with some alcohol, where bits of food are dipped into the cheese and eaten. (Fondue comes from the French fondre, meaning to melt). What if we just called it Swiss melted cheese soup? We could make the same case for raclette, which is a large cheese which is heated until it starts melting, then this cheese is scraped off and eaten with other foods. Raclette is even less known outside Switzerland than fondue.

I'm surprised you understood The Pier's restaurant menu "completely", which means the following terms were not foreign to you at all and didn't scream of "w*nkery": buffalo mozzarella (as opposed to what many might know as mozzarella cheese); balsamico; endive; XO sauce (nothing to do with cognac); vinaigrette; kale; cured ham; brioche; five spice; sabayon. For that matter, you didn't circle "focaccia" in the menu above, unless you were not trying to labour on the point.

The only restuarant I go to that has terms explained on the menu is a Hispanic restaurant where the words used are not necessarily common in use in Australia...

 

[dmitri]

Not to be picky anat0l but:

"A classic one is a Croque Monsieur. To most, that's just a ham and cheese sandwich, although to be brutally thorough, it does, to stick to its original incarnation, need to have both the correct ingredients and technique."

You forgot toasted for a croque monsieur