food menus as art, as electronics and as everything in-between

This week has been so busy, I haven’t even had time to realize I’ve been busy. That’s meant very little cooking and absolutely no interesting dining out, though I did cobble together a sandwich the other day that I’ve been eating on repeat: sliced poached chicken, peach preserves, caramelized onion jam, brie cheese and butter lettuce on a brioche bun.

Try it sometime. I’m not sure what’s not to like. Someday soon, I’m going to write about how I’ve become a chicken-poaching evangelist.

Today’s essay has absolutely nothing to do with chicken or sandwiches or poached anything. I hope I don’t come off too cranky. I’m not cranky at all! Enjoy.

One of the best menus in America is a plastic-encased sign stuck to the wall of a pool hall in the middle of Missouri. The not-quite-slider-sized burgers at Booches are some of the most delicious I’ve ever had, but that’s beside the point: The menu is huge and simple, with the important stuff in bold. Burger, cheeseburger, pork loin, hot dog, a bunch of different combinations of sausage and egg. You can get soup on Fridays, and you cannot pay with a credit card. Sometimes, a new price is papered over an old one. Booches opened in 1884. There’s been some inflation.

Walk into Booches, look up at the wall, and pick what you want. Spend 30 seconds thinking about what you’re going to eat and the rest of the day thinking about how much you enjoyed it. That, I think, is the secret to a perfect menu: not what’s on it, but how well it works — both for the person who’s stomach is rumbling and as a reflection of the place serving the food.

I’ve always considered myself a pretty proficient diner-outer. Growing up, my family had dinner in a restaurant at least twice a week, and we ate at all kinds of places: Steak ‘n’ Shake, Waffle House, Burger King, a neighborhood pizza spot. We dined on white tablecloths in Sea Island, in a booth at a cafe where the bread is served with an overhand toss, at a slightly grimy Mongolian barbecue called, so as to leave nothing to the imagination, Mongolian Barbecue. We ordered off walls, off screens, off paper, off laminated pages and expensive card stock pressed into heavy folios. 

Form matched function. The menus we never cared to think about again gave us no reason to. The ones we wanted to remember were pretty enough to be souvenirs. And very rarely, if at all, was anyone ever confused.

No longer.

I recently ate at a relatively elegant restaurant whose menu was printed, double-sided, on a standard sheet of paper and wedged between two thick pieces of plexiglass. This menu sat in the middle of the table and was meant to be shared, one person reading from each side. As if that weren’t enough, the food was bunched into categories — bread, vegetable, meat, fish — that offered barely any indication about how many people each dish would serve or what order they might all come out in. For the 20 minutes before and after ordering, I thought the meal was ruined, that I’d chosen all wrong, that the very kind waiter had taken me for an idiot, or worse: high-maintenance.

Then the food came, and it was plated beautifully and tasted wonderful and ended up being pretty close to the right amount. It was a memorable meal — but the chaotic menu is what I’ll remember best.

one of my favorite coffee table books, a compendium of artistic restaurant menus from 1800-2000

Unlike most restaurant-related gripes these days, this isn’t a screed against new ways of ordering food. In fact, it might not even be a gripe at all. I’m just advocating for functionality. That doesn’t mean reducing menus to the simplest possible laundry lists or removing technology entirely or scrawling every dish big and loud on an indoor billboard (though menu boards did work well for centuries!). It’s certainly not about Americanizing the names of international dishes or listing every single ingredient and calorie. It’s about restaurants understanding who they serve and why those people have chosen to dine there.

So sometimes that means constellations of little dots, pasted to a picnic table. Sometimes it’s Booches, or sticky lamination. And sometimes it’s the signed tasting menu from the mouthwatering, dimly-lit dinner my husband and I ate on our honeymoon, which we want to have framed.

Dining out in this country isn’t always an occasion anymore, but sometimes it is, and I’ll hold onto those sometimes with every bit of strength I can muster. I’ll stand by my opinion of Booches and happily pray for cell service every time I have to toggle between the online food menu and drinks at the taco place down the street. But when I’m old and gray and perpetually satisfied after a couple thousand memorable meals, I hope I have a stack of menus somewhere I meant to get framed, if only there had been time between all those dinners.