Excuse us for just a moment, we're just picking ourselves back up off the floor and composing our faces again, wiping the tears and so on. You see, some bright American spark (they're always American) has studied quite a lot of menus and has come up with the fascinating hypothesis that the wordier and more grandiose a menu is, the more it's likely to cost you. No, really, let us explain.
Prof Dan Jurafsky, of Stanford no less, analysed 6,500 menus from a range of eateries and came up with the equation of every extra letter on the description = 11p on the bill. The fancier the restaurant, the more verbiage there is as restaurants of that ilk expect their clientele to be more educated, pandering in fact to their snob intellect. Cheaper places, on the other hand, lack the innate trust that comes with paying £100 a head rather than £9.99 (! Yup, better believe we have "trust" at that price), and therefore rely rather more heavily on "convincing" language, such as "gourmet", "tasty" and - worryingly - "delicious." However, this type of language can actually lower the bill by up to 5p per dish so what he's saying is basically, as a rule of thumb, if a restaurant's menu is having to work really hard to convince you that their food is nice, it probably won't be but it will be cheap and you're quite thick so you won't even notice.
What this equation means when faced with the new St John-based trend of menu description as guessing game (Think "Pork, watercress, barley"), we can't work out. Or if a chain restaurant used the word "velouté" accidentally instead of soup, should we complain because in theory we shouldn't be expected to know that word and they're being prejudiced, or scratch out another 33p ( or more because an accent might add more pennies) and get out the calculator because this French malarkey is COSTING us.
Equally fascinatingly - and for no reason we can think of - The Sunday Times actually asked him to compare the Harvester menu (42 dishes) with Restaurant Gordon Ramsay's (12 dishes) at roughly £9.99 and £95 per head respectively. Putting his finest critical head on, Prof Dan came up with the startling insight that at Restaurant GR you're paying for "the chef to do something fabulous and new." At the Harvester , "you want to be able to order exactly what you want." Forgive us, darling, for pointing this out but usually pricing structure is based slightly more on the quality of ingredients, expertise in the kitchen and front of house and experience, not on the ability to bulk-order 42 dishes worth of pre-cooked, over-sweetened junk food. He also points out - and we can almost see him foaming at the mouth as he says it - that littering the menu with provenance - "Cornish turbot", "Isle of Skye scallops" - is another way of avoiding using a superlative, presumably such as "super smashing great" as Harvester would put it, provenance not high on their list.
Now you see why we've been weeping silently into our morning coffee. But what this does of course do is fully explain those annoying menu quirks of "pan-fried", "sea scallops", "oven-roasted"... They're clearly just a way of adding money to the bill, 11p at a time.
