It’s My Menu! Not Yours, Mine! Get Your Own!

Every restaurant has a set menu. Well, 99% of them do. Even the restaurants in Los Angeles where you can bring your dog and let them sit on the chair with you have menus. Dogs have menus people. Dogs. Are you a dog? I hope so, because if you were a dog and you were reading this, that would be awesome. But seriously, a restaurant has a menu for reasons.

Generally the menu defines what the restaurant is all about. You can easily pick up any menu from any restaurant and immediately know what kind of restaurant it is without even stepping foot inside a building. See hamburgers, baked beans and chicken wings? It’s probably American-style, or pub. See fois gras, boeuf a la provencal, and sweetbreads, it’s probably going to be French. Every now and then you’ll get a blend of different style: a couple different things that the owner/chef knows how to make, or a hip new infusion-style restaurant. One of my favorite restaurants to visit when I’m in Chicago is this place called Avec. http://www.avecrestaurant.com/ It’s a bit of a Mediterranean-style place with different foods from Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. The type of menu they have, like everyone else’s, identifies to everyone what kind of restaurant it is.

To the trained eye, the menu will also tell what sorts of things the kitchen has in stock. The kitchen manager will generally order portions of food that the current menu needs. Most of the time any restaurant in a higher quality than your local McDonald’s will have specials that will run for anywhere from being a daily special, to a seasonal special lasting two-to-three months. The specials are a completely different monster of their own. On occasion the executive chef will decide to special order a certain kind of meat, cheese, or vegetable and make the special out of that. Whether or not that special is going to be successful is a different story. If it doesn’t go well, they’ll extend the special until that product runs out or goes bad. But, usually the special consists of produce that the kitchen already has in stock and wants to make something different.

But let me tell you, unless you don’t see an ingredient anywhere on the menu in other dishes, there’s a slim chance that the kitchen is going to have it in stock.

Now, what all this means is, ladies and gentlemen, order from the damn menu. If you go into a restaurant and complain that they don’t have buffalo wings when the sign read above you when you walked through the front door “Olive Garden”, you’re going to look pretty damn foolish.