Let me let you in on a little secret (and by secret I mean “a thing that I’m gonna try to force you to agree with because I’m right, damnit”). Menus aren’t just lists of the food you want to shove into your mouth, even if it’s that one at the Denny’s you like that shows you pictures of dancing ham when you’re drunk at 3 in the morning.
Menus are expectation-formers, and you’ll agree if you think for more than two seconds about it. You know the feeling: it’s late, you’re hungry as hell. You stumble into whatever bar/gastropub-like-thing is lucky enough to be graced with your presence. And you already know what you want, not because of what your stomach’s telling you, but because it’s been locked in your mind for the last week. I don’t even have to try to describe it to you, because you’re already thinking about it.
Despite all that, you go in and read it on the menu anyway. Why? Because you like putting the image in your head, that’s why. You want that same, warm, slow, methodical description on the page that you’ve read all the other times to paint you a picture, and you want that picture to marinate in your head for 30 minutes while you sip a beer and wait for it to appear in front of you. The actual eating part almost (almost) doesn’t even matter. It’s incidental to the real thing: the picture. I mean, the eating takes all of what, half an hour at the most? But the image, that’s the thing that stays with you; before, after, and during the digestion. Doesn’t that sound a hell of a lot more potent than the stuff on the plate?
Or maybe I’m just a fatass and like thinking about tiny cakes way too much. Either way I made madeleines, so enjoy thinking about those for a while. Or just look at that picture up there and dream away.
I won’t judge. —Fresh Beats, Fresh Eats
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