Restaurants: 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—voilà!

—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.