Menu Design (You Don' Mess With the Sushi Chef)

Monday morning started with odds and ends, students recounting their culinary experience from the weekend. Russian Pam Anderson went to a neighborhood joint near her home in the East Village, and found it both filthy and delicious. Slovack Ricky Martin seemed hung over as he recounted a business meeting at Daniel recently -- as good as the hype. English Rose gave us the heads up that Martha Stewart would be visiting four restaurants on 10th street this week on her show, and passed around an article from the Daily News about a sushi chef on his way to work when he got cut off by some yob. They pulled over, and sushi chef went all sushi on his ass with his 12" sushi knife. What that had to do with English Rose's weekend is beyond me.

Northfork Gal went to Tabla in the last week, and had a good experience with their Restaurant Week specials. I recalled a story for the class about how I used to go there relatively often for period when I was, errr, wooing various women n' stuff. After getting married, I was there with a friend out of town and a guy in a suit comes up to the table and asks for me by name. I nervously acknowlege that it's me, and he thanks me, as a rep of the restaurant, for being a loyal customer -- it was my 10th visit -- and the chef had a special course for me. Richard thought it could of been done in a quieter and less intrusive way, by just sending out the course and acknowleging the reason on the bill. Oh well.

The majority of the class was dedicated to menu design. First was a discussion of the general types of menus. All menus fall into one of the following categories, but they are not mutually exclusive either -- some combine them, some have different menus for different times of day, week or occasion.

• A La Carte: Literally 'from the cart', customers order individual items with individual prices at well.
• Prix Fixe: Set number of courses at a set price. Choices within course.
• Menu Fixe: Set number of courses at a set price, with set dishes. Usually at a catered affair.
• Degustation: A tasting menu of many fixed small plates, usually representing the thoughts of the chef.
• Table d'Hote: "Table of the Host", whatever comes out of the kitchen is what you eat.
• Cycle Menu: Menu cycles through a rotation over a period of days, weeks or months. Typical of institution with a captive population, like schools, prisons and corporate cafeterias.
• Du Jour Menu: Changes every day, without repeat
• Limited Menu: Few items. Used to be just fast food, but more upscale restaurants have focused on smaller menus. NYC French restaurants used to have 30+ entrees, now a days limit to less than half of that. Red-sauce lower-end Italian joints will still have something like veal or chicken 10 different ways each, on a large menu.
• Meal Period Menu: Multiple menus per day.
• California Menu: All meals at all times, like some diners.
• Party Menu: For specific events, like the super bowl.
• Buffet Menu: Less formal. The diner chooses food quantity and plate presentation.

Next we had an exercise with a menu from a restaurant called Le Cherche-Midi, where Richard served as maitre-d years ago, and has since closed. It was a hand-written thing that had an unusual French menu - rustic regional food of the provencal region. There was an a la carte menu and a fix prixe menu whose content was almost identical, except for the structure. Why? In the summer when things were slow, if someone wanted to come in just for a drink and an appetizer, no problem, things are slow. In the winter where there usually was a line to get in, some shmoe sipping a drink for an hour would cost the restaurant, so the menu guaranteed these people would not come in.

The rest of the day, I kind of tuned out -- it was a very basic primer in graphic design, about the importance of font, lay out, highlighting, serif vs. san-serif fonts, stuff that really takes a few months of hands on work to really appreciate, here summed up in under an hour. Sorry, readers, I was too tired to pay attention!