A menu should be more than a list of ingredients

The ingredient listicle is rife in restaurants today.

Little Hill Farm Chicken, eggplant, capers, wild rice. Or: Octopus, chickpeas, carrot. Painting a picture for you? Lighting a fire of expectation? If, like sex, there should be a little mystery to spice things up, this is one helluva curry. Or pasta. Or casserole. Or roast, as the case may be. And that’s my point. Who knows with any confidence just what this dish might be?

As you’ll have noticed, the Federal Government is clamping down on origin-of-food labelling, even if it can’t get it together on realistic definitions of “free range”. No more dodgy, wink-wink suggestions of local provenance when something is grown in a third-world country and shipped here for packaging with a proud Aussie flag on the box. Good. The next challenge is to get chefs to write menus that actually help customers make decisions about what to order, not flirt with badly punctuated lists of nouns.

Old fashioned, I know, but the above chicken example is real. In a certain kind of restaurant these days, usually one with a “philosophy”, this kind of ingredient listicle is rife.

Maybe you like having to ask waiters for explanations of the fundamental nature of a dish, a task precious few handle properly. Maybe you like the Russian roulette of “let’s order and see what comes”. You’re rare. And if forcing that engagement is what the chef/restaurateur wants, he or she needs staff who can handle it — who know the dishes backwards and engage — not those who mumble into their beards, failing to rise above ambient noise levels. How often have you sat at a table and asked the person opposite, “What did he just say?”

So when a menu description leaves almost zero idea of what to expect — wet/dry, hot/cold, steamed/roasted/fried — I don’t think anyone is being well served. And plenty feel the same: good customers, with good money, marginalised by this kind of detail-free tucker tease.

I ordered that chicken dish at a rather adventurous and interesting little place in NSW’s Hunter Valley not long ago. I did so entirely because they use a certain chicken grower, and I’d visited the farm that day. Now, I’d be fascinated to know what your expectations might be of “Little Hill Farm Chicken, eggplant, capers, wild rice”. I subsequently asked for a written explanation of how it is prepared, and was told: “Chicken has been deboned, we make a mousse and confit from the Maryland. It is then wrapped in the breast and the skin, roasted and dipped in chicken jus. Served with eggplant fried and pureed, chicken fat béarnaise, topped with ‘chicken scratch’, a mixture of puffed rice, raisins, capers and sea blight.” Just what you had in mind?

Obviously, it’s difficult with a dish that embraces many techniques and elements to tightly describe it in a way that is both alluring and informative. But at the very least, a paraphrased sub-par would seem a fair compromise. “Boned, roasted pasture-raised chicken breast with a chicken farce, eggplant, béarnaise and puffed rice” might do it. Meet us in the middle. Design and typography could nuance the presentation, give weight to hero elements. The bottom line? Menus are important. Not simply random ingredients, listed. So let’s communicate a little better. Let’s consume food when we go out, not lists.