Writing about Food, the Language of Menus and Translated Sources

A food writer must be bold both at the desk and at the stove.

The author emphasises that a good food writer should be able both to cook and to write boldly and engagingly about that experience. Creative non-fiction about food—memoirs, novels, poetry and the art of menu writing

• The lecture explains that food writing is a broad field encompassing many genres, while focusing primarily on creative non-fiction and literary forms—memoirs, novels and poetry—in which food serves both as a subject and as a symbolic device.

• The lecture explains why and how food appears in literature, and stresses the importance of sensory detail and understanding the audience when describing food, including in menus, cookbooks and reviews;

• it also shows how food can advance a plot, convey social and historical context, and reveal character.

• Other forms of non-fiction, such as journalism, reportage, culinary history, nutritional science and culinary travel, are explicitly excluded from the lecture, with the exception of menu writing because of its close connection with hospitality and the art of dining.

1. The scope and definition of food writing

• Creative non-fiction as the central genre: food writing spans many genres—novels, poetry, cookbooks, travel writing, personal essays and journalism about nutritional science—but the lecture emphasises creative non-fiction as its most widespread and commercially viable form.

• Creative non-fiction is defined as writing about factual material using creative strategies, such as narrative techniques from fiction, to produce an engaging, novel-like narrative.

• Diverse backgrounds and a shared appreciation: writers enter the field from a wide variety of professional backgrounds;

• the constant foundation, however, is an understanding and enjoyment of food.

• The lecturer notes that someone who does not enjoy eating is unlikely to write about food.

• This shared appreciation supports authenticity, sensory richness and reader engagement across subgenres.

2. The purposes and functions of food in literature

• Direct, literal description of food: food may be described directly in contexts such as menus, cookbooks and restaurant reviews, with an emphasis on sensory qualities—smell, appearance and taste.

• Effective direct food description addresses key questions: where the ingredients come from, who the audience is—the reader or diner—and how much culinary knowledge that audience has.

• It draws on appealing, descriptive and visual language specific to food to convey sensory experience and cooking methods vividly.

• Food as symbol, metaphor and narrative device: beyond literal description, food functions as a symbol or representation, conveying meanings that extend beyond the dish itself.

• In novels, eating scenes can advance the plot, provide social and historical context, and add “literary colour”, enriching setting and mood.

• Food reveals character: social and economic background, education and values. Through food choices and associated moments, readers infer a character’s personality and status.

• These functions align with the fundamental aims of narrative: exploring desires and fears, describing events, and showing how a character changes as a result of them.

3. Genre focus and exclusions in this lecture

• An emphasis on memoirs, novels and poetry: the lecture concentrates on culinary memoirs, novels and poetry as literary forms in which creative techniques are integral rather than merely borrowed.

• It argues that food helps these forms tell relatable stories by grounding abstract themes in concrete sensory experience.

• Exclusions, with an exception for menus: the lecture does not cover journalism, reportage, culinary history, nutritional science or culinary travel, although it acknowledges that they often use creative techniques borrowed from fiction.

• Menu writing is a deliberate exception because of its strong connection with hospitality and the “art of dining”, making it relevant to the lecture’s focus on literary and aesthetic aspects.

4. Practical considerations for descriptive food writing

• Understanding audience and context: writers should adapt descriptions to the reader or diner and their culinary knowledge, ensuring clarity without condescension and selecting appropriate terminology.

• The provenance of ingredients adds depth by placing dishes within geographical, cultural and ethical contexts that enrich narrative or evaluative purposes.

• Language and sensory detail: use vivid, precise food vocabulary to convey smell, appearance and taste;

• this is crucial in menus, cookbooks and reviews for engaging readers and shaping expectations.

• Sensory detail should be balanced with the purpose of the narrative: in a literary context, it can illuminate character and theme;

• in practical contexts such as menus, it informs and attracts attention.

The language of restaurant menus and signals of price

This lecture examines how the language of restaurant menus signals price and status, drawing on research by Stanford University linguistics professor Daniel Jurafsky. It contrasts traditional menu writing, which uses particular keywords and descriptive language to justify higher prices, with the artistic, unconventional menus of elite restaurants such as Osteria Francescana.

While a typical menu works as a clear contract with the diner, avant-garde tasting menus use abstract and imaginative dish names to present dining as art, sending the diner on a gastronomic journey guided by a creative chef.

1. Linguistic signals of price and status in menus

• Daniel Jurafsky’s research: Daniel Jurafsky wrote How to Read a Menu. He and his team analysed thousands of menus to understand how word choice signals a restaurant’s high status and justifies higher prices.

• Historical and contemporary linguistic tools:

o In the 1970s, foreign words, particularly French or Italian ones, were a sign of sophistication.

o Today, restaurants use other linguistic tools to indicate a higher price, including: descriptions of provenance. § Cooking methods. § Descriptions of how food is served. § References to seasonality. §

• Keywords that justify higher prices:

o The study identified words correlated with high prices: farm, ranch, pasture, woodland, garden, farmers’ market, heritage, heirloom, exotic.

o Long words such as “reconstructed” and “dehydrated” also signal a higher price.

o Naming spices and stating their origins increases perceived value.

• Phrases and status: phrases such as “chef’s choice” indicate a premium offering, unlike “your choice”.

• Indicators of a mid-range restaurant:

o The use of “linguistic fillers”: “delicious”, “rich”, “crispy”.

o Words that cast doubt on quality by stating the obvious, such as “real” and “fresh”, indicate a mid-range establishment.

2. The menu as a communication tool

• The menu’s dual function: it is both a marketing text and a contract between the diner and the restaurant. It should clearly communicate the available options, what the food will be like and what it costs.

• Traditional menu structure: information should be easy to find, leading to the familiar organisation into starters, main courses and desserts.

• Breaking conventions: a restaurant may deliberately break these conventions to communicate a different character or brand identity.

3. The art of the tasting menu

• Example: Osteria Francescana. This Modena restaurant’s tasting menu is used as an example of breaking conventions. It has no traditional sections or prices, and the dish names are abstract, obscure or even absurd.

• Characteristics of an artistic tasting menu:

o Abstract dish names: for example, “beautiful psychedelic spin-painted veal” and “oops, I dropped the lemon tart”.

o An absence of rules: because it is a tasting menu, the diner has no choice.

o A reflection of experience: the names reflect the creative and experiential nature of the food.

• The chef as artist:

o Such a menu places diners in the hands of a creative chef for a “gastronomic journey”.

o Food is presented as the chef’s art, while the diners take the role of an audience.

o This is “chef’s choice to the highest degree”, and the food writing reflects that artistic control.

Analysis of a food scene in literature

Work: Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. Scene: Professor Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky and Dr Bormenthal having lunch.

• Plot development: at first glance, this scene slows the action, but it actually establishes crucial philosophical exposition. Over lunch, Preobrazhensky articulates his credo—the famous line, “Do not read Soviet newspapers before lunch”—and establishes a hierarchy in his relationship with Bormenthal, preparing the reader for his subsequent conflict with Sharikov and Shvonder.

• Revealing a character’s background: the food brilliantly reveals Philip Philipovich’s social, economic and educational status. He insists on hot appetisers, drinks vodka from the proper small tumblers rather than stemmed glasses, and teaches Bormenthal the art of dining: “Only landowners whom the Bolsheviks haven’t quite finished slaughtering chase their drinks with cold appetisers and soup.” His choices—caviar, roast beef and an elaborate hot appetiser on black bread—reveal an aristocrat of the spirit, a wealthy man, an aesthete and a representative of the old Moscow intelligentsia, accustomed to and knowledgeable about a high standard of living.

• Social/historical context: the scene takes place in 1920s Moscow. Against a background of devastation, widespread shortages and the rations eaten by the proletariat, and fed to the dog Sharik on the street, the lavishly laid table in the professor’s dining room creates an extraordinary historical contrast. Food here underlines the social divide between the surviving intellectual elite, preserving pre-revolutionary traditions, and the new Soviet reality.

[An educational example of a dish description; this text does not confirm that the dish was actually served or that the listed ingredients were supplied.]

Assignment 2. A menu description of a single dish

Audience: fine-dining restaurant guests seeking refined flavours and valuing aesthetics and environmentally responsible ingredients. Ingredient origins: Murmansk (fish), Sakhalin (roe), local farms (root vegetables and microgreens).

Menu text:

Murmansk halibut fillet with slow-cooked celeriac and roe sauce

“Chablis” Imagine the icy freshness of northern seas embodied in an exquisite culinary creation. At the heart of our dish is a supremely tender fillet of wild halibut, flown directly from the cold, crystal-clear waters of Murmansk. We sear the fish in a hot cast-iron pan until a delicate golden-amber crust forms, carefully preserving its melting, pearlescent texture within. As soon as the plate reaches your table, you will sense the subtle scent of a sea breeze, harmoniously interwoven with the warm, nutty, earthy notes of celeriac purée. The celeriac comes from local eco-farms and is slowly cooked in a wood-fired oven to reveal its natural sweetness. A thick cream sauce based on French white wine gently envelops the fish. Each spoonful bursts on the tongue with the salty pearls of selected red roe from Sakhalin, creating a perfect balance between the delicate purée and the halibut’s marine character. The final touch is young sorrel microgreens, adding visual freshness and a light citrus acidity that cleanses the palate. It is a play of contrasting textures and a symphony of flavours, created to surprise.

The menus of two local Tallinn restaurants: the elite Michelin-starred 180° by Matthias Diether and the popular, affordable café Kompressor, a well-known pancake restaurant in the Old Town.

Here is how their menus reflect the concepts described by Professor Jurafsky.

1. Elite restaurant: 180° by Matthias Diether

This restaurant is an ideal example of the artistic tasting-menu concept discussed in the lecture.

• Structure and format: the menu has no traditional sections such as “starters” or “main courses”. The guest has no choice: it is a fixed set. Dinner is presented as a gastronomic journey in which guests place themselves entirely in the hands of a creative chef.

• The highest degree of “chef’s choice”: the menu opens with a section entitled “Matthias’ inspiration”. Such personalised wording signals a premium offering, unlike the standard phrase “your choice”.

• Names of dishes and ingredients: the names make extensive use of abstraction, emphasising the concept, for example “Tomato marshmallow”, “Carrot variations in the 180° style” or “Sour chocolate”. The menu also emphasises the prestigious origins of ingredients, mentioning names such as Comté cheese, N25 Kaluga Reserve caviar and cheeses from Bernard Antony’s cellar, artificially increasing the dishes’ perceived value.

2. Mid-range restaurant: Pub Kompressor

The pancake restaurant’s menu works as a conventional contract with the guest: it is exceptionally clear and practical.

• Traditional structure: to make navigation straightforward and information easy to find, the menu is strictly divided into conventional categories: “Pancakes”, “Sweet pancakes”, “Snacks” and “Salads”.

• Stating the obvious: in the Estonian and English menu versions, one can find words confirming obvious properties of the ingredients, for example “Fresh salad with chicken fillet” (Värske salat). According to the lecture, words such as “fresh” or “real” are clear indicators of a restaurant in the middle price range.

• Straightforward descriptions: unlike elite establishments, there are no abstract metaphors or references to exotic farms. The names simply and honestly describe the contents of a serving: “Pancake with beef, pickled cucumber and cream cheese”. The food does not claim to be conceptual art, and the menu fulfils a purely practical function.

[TRANSLATED SOURCE. Excerpts headed “The Language of Food”, “How to Read a Menu” and “Entrée”. The recollections, the pronouns “I” and “we”, the collection of 6,500 menus and the analysis results belong to the author of the source material, not to Andrei Gritskov. The author, exact edition, pages and boundaries of quotation require verification. Daniel Jurafsky is named in the subsequent commentary in the original manuscript.]

The Language of Food

In our family, the joke about “consensus” is legendary: she read only every other chapter of War and Peace, so we say she read only Tolstoy’s Peace.

All innovation happens at intersections. Great food is no exception: it is born where cultures meet, as each borrows and transforms its neighbours’ ideas. The language of food is a window into these “in-between spaces”: ancient encounters between civilisations, modern cultural conflicts, and hidden clues to human thought, society and evolution. Every time you roast a turkey for Thanksgiving, raise a toast at a wedding, or choose crisps or ice cream in a shop, you take part in a conversation in the language of food.

San Francisco, California April 2014

How to Read a Menu

The most expensive restaurant in San Francisco will not give you a menu. Well, not quite. The waiters will gladly email you a beautifully printed list of dishes—“taro root, sea urchin, cardoon, brassicas…”—as a souvenir after your visit. This superb Michelin-starred restaurant is not alone. More and more expensive restaurants offer “blind” tasting menus, where you do not know what you will eat until the dish appears in front of you. The higher the restaurant’s status, the less choice you have.

Status used to be expressed differently. If you ate out in the 1970s, you probably visited establishments that the writer Calvin Trillin called La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine. These were pretentious “continental cuisine” restaurants whose menus mixed French and English. Trillin complained of being taken to a “purple palace” where the principal creative employee was the menu writer rather than the chef.

Menu-writing textbooks advised “continentalising” the menu: mixing French words with English or Italian, sometimes merely adding the French article Le to an English phrase:

Flaming Coffee Diablo, Prepared en Vue of Guest Ravioli parmigiana, en casserole Le Crabmeat Cocktail

Such menus are more than fashion. Thanks to the internet, we can study old menus in the New York Public Library’s collection. Early twentieth-century menus from expensive restaurants often abound in French words:

Flounder sur le plat Eggs au beurre noir Fried chicken à la Maryland half Green turtle à l’anglaise Sirloin steak aux champignons

This looks a little naïve today, but social status has not disappeared. Modern expensive restaurants still find ways to display it.

Every time you read a dish description, you see hidden linguistic clues about wealth, class and marketing techniques.

How to recognise an expensive restaurant from its menu Look at descriptions such as these:

Herb Roasted Elysian Fields Farms Lamb Eggplant Porridge, Cherry Peppers, Greenmarket Cucumbers and Pine Nut Jus

Grass Fed Angus Beef Carpaccio Pan Roasted King Trumpet Mushrooms

Dirty Girl Farm Romano Bean Tempura Persillade, Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Bison Burger 8 oz, blue star farms, grass fed & pasture raised, melted gorgonzola

The menu pays enormous attention to ingredient provenance: farms, ranches and markets. Research has shown that expensive restaurants mention ingredient origins fifteen times more often than inexpensive ones.

Expensive restaurants more often offer a fixed menu or “chef’s choice”:

Sashimi Omakase: ten kinds of chef’s choice Antipasto Della Casa: the chef’s daily selection

In inexpensive restaurants, the reverse is true—there is more choice:

Baby lamb chops grilled to your liking Quiche with your choice of either house salad or soup Biscuits and gravy with eggs any way you like ’em

A large menu study We assembled a database of 6,500 menus, containing 650,000 dishes, from seven US cities and analysed their language.

Results:

• Expensive restaurants mention the guest’s choice half as often

• They mention the chef’s choice seven times more often

• They use longer and “rarer” words

• Words on expensive restaurants’ menus are, on average, twice as long

Why? Frequently used words become shorter over time—Zipf’s law. Longer words therefore sound “more expensive”.

Examples of “expensive” words: decaffeinated, accompaniments, traditional, specifications, preparation, magnificent, exquisite.

Inexpensive restaurants use short forms: decaf, sides, extras.

Conclusion: “complicated” words signal an expensive restaurant. More importantly, however, menu language gives clues to a dish’s price.

We also found that the strongest factor determining price is the type of ingredient. Lobster, for example, costs more than chicken, regardless of the description.

The result: a menu is not a list of food. It is a language of status, marketing and psychology.

After controlling for all these factors, we examined the additional influence of individual words on prices.

We found that when a restaurant uses longer words to describe a dish, it charges more for it. Each one-letter increase in average word length is associated with an eighteen-cent increase in the dish’s price. This means that if a restaurant uses words that are three letters longer on average, you will pay around fifty-four cents more for fried chicken or pasta. They seem to be “half-dollar words” rather than “two-dollar words”, but you will still pay more when the menu uses long, “sophisticated” vocabulary.

Counting letters is one way to uncover hidden information in a menu. Another is to check whether the restaurant emphasises how “exotic” or spicy its food is. If so, be careful. Phrases such as “an exotic blend of Indian spices” or “tamarind fish soup with exotic vegetables” raise the price of a dish. Our research showed that each use of exotic or spices increases a dish’s price.

The likely reason is that such food is not exotic to people who eat it every day and know its real price. This “exoticising” is aimed at tourists and people seeking something new, who are prepared to pay more.

“Linguistic fillers” on menus

Another way to read between the lines of a menu is to look for linguistic fillers. These are positive but vague words: delicious, tasty, flavorful, scrumptious, savory, or terrific, wonderful, delightful, sublime. They promise something special, but vaguely enough to let the restaurant avoid responsibility.

There are also “appealing adjectives”: zesty, rich, golden brown, crispy, crunchy. These are not entirely meaningless, but they are often subjective.

We found that such words are more often associated with lower prices. Each word such as delicious, tasty or terrific is associated with a roughly 9% decrease in a dish’s average price. Each word such as rich, chunky or zesty is associated with a decrease of about 2%.

This is not proof of causation, only correlation. Inexpensive restaurants may use more “fillers” to compensate for the absence of genuinely expensive ingredients.

Mid-range menus

In fact, long, wordy menus with many “tasty” adjectives are more common in mid-range restaurants—chains such as Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I. Friday’s and the Cheesecake Factory.

Words such as fresh, rich, spicy, crispy, juicy, fluffy, flaky and buttery occur much more frequently there.

Why? The literal meaning of the words is obvious: “delicious” means the food tastes good; “ripe” means the apples are ripe. But why say it? Surely a restaurant cannot serve bad food and unripe apples? These words fulfil a marketing function.

H. Paul Grice offered an answer to this problem. Grice pointed out that when we try to understand a speaker, we assume that they are acting rationally. If they say something is fresh, there must be a reason to say it is fresh; speakers do not simply add random words. Grice called this the “maxim of quantity”; there is also a related “maxim of relevance”, which states that speakers try to say relevant things. So, if I hear someone say that something is fresh—or ripe, fluffy or golden brown—I immediately wonder why mentioning ripeness would be relevant. We usually mention ripeness because there is an implicit comparison with unripeness. It sounds something like this: “You may be worried that this fruit is unripe, but do not worry: I hereby assure you that it is ripe.” In other words, the very mention of ripeness raises the possibility that some people might think the produce is not ripe, and I mention it to reassure them.

Linguist Mark Liberman suggests viewing this excessive mentioning as a symptom of “status anxiety”. Expensive restaurants do not use ripe—or fresh or crispy—because we assume that food which should be ripe is ripe and that everything is fresh. Mid-range restaurants worry that you will not make that assumption because they are not sufficiently glamorous, so they go out of their way to reassure you. They protest too much.

We can see a similar implication of Grice’s idea in the use of real on menus. You will find this word on many menus, but precisely which foods restaurants call “real” depends heavily on price. Inexpensive restaurants promise real whipped cream, real mashed potatoes and real bacon:

Chocolate-chip pancakes: served with real whipped cream.

Homestyle meatloaf: served with real mashed potatoes, vegetables and gravy.

Chicken patty: melted Swiss cheese in a bun with lettuce, tomato, Thousand Island dressing and real bacon bits.

In slightly more expensive ($$) restaurants, real is used mainly to describe crab and maple syrup:

California roll: real crab and avocado

Blueberry wholegrain pancakes: with real maple syrup

By contrast, in more expensive ($ and $$) restaurants, real is hardly used at all. This is not because those restaurants’ bacon is not real, but because consumers already assume that the bacon, whipped cream and crab are real. If an expensive restaurant called its crab “real”, it would imply that its authenticity might be questioned and needed defending. Grice’s principle comes into play again: if a restaurant says its butter is real, there must be a reason to say so, and the usual reason for taking the trouble to say that something is real is a concern that your listener might think it fake and a desire to reassure them. Expensive restaurants certainly do not want to suggest that any customer might consider their butter fake.

The history of which foods are called “real” or “genuine” on menus is a miniature lesson in what was considered valuable enough to imitate. In the 1990s, there was real bacon rather than Bacon Bits. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was real whipped cream rather than Cool Whip, and real sour cream rather than Imo. Menus from the 1960s offered real butter rather than margarine. In the 1940s and 1930s, there was genuine calf’s liver. Around 1900, the foods most often described as “real” or “genuine” were none of these. People then worried about fake beer and fake turtles. Menus of the period boasted “genuine German beer” and “real turtle”. German pale lager arrived during the great nineteenth-century German immigration, along with hamburgers, sausages, seltzer, home-fried potatoes, potato salad and delicatessens. Before this, Americans drank only dark, English-style ale. Pale, cold-fermented lagers brewed by ethnic German entrepreneurs such as Miller, Pabst, Schlitz and Busch became popular by the turn of the nineteenth century, and restaurants boasted of being able to serve this new prestige product. Turtle soup was also a sought-after delicacy, so much so that mock turtle soup made from brains and calves’ heads—not from Mock Turtles, whatever Lewis Carroll may say—was common as a cheaper substitute. In fact, Jane Ziegelman tells us in her book 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families that New York restaurants “often nailed a real turtle shell to the doorframe” to indicate that they served genuine green turtle soup.

The signs we use to indicate prestige today are less obvious than that turtle shell, but they are still present on menus. Of course, we no longer use broken French. Our modern fashionable menus are light and concise, without cheap filler adjectives or endless assurances about what is “real”. When displaying high status, less is more—in words as well as in food. Instead, fashionable menus are lightly seasoned with something else: carefully chosen, obscure gastronomic terms and pastoral images of green pastures and heirloom vegetables. If they offer you a menu at all.

You should probably avoid a menu overloaded with linguistic fillers such as crispy, crusty, zesty, juicy, spicy, chunky, smoky or fluffy—adjectives written by a menu writer who is trying too hard to persuade you. As for “exotic”, if you see it, do not pay the premium it implies. Instead, do what Calvin Trillin would do: slip down the street to somewhere authentic enough not to need to prove it so insistently.

Chapter Two Entrée

LIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO means visitors, and visitors are a reason to come down from Bernal Hill and explore the many delicious dinner options on Mission Street. My visitors are always willing to experiment with food, but sometimes they find odd things to complain about. My grumpy British friend Paul is irritated by the endless questions in local cafés: “Single or double? Small, medium, large? For here or to go? Regular milk or soya? Whole or skimmed?” “Just give me the bloody coffee,” says Paul, who thinks Americans have control issues. Indeed, as we have just seen, the abundance of choice offered by cafés, diners, fast-food outlets and other inexpensive establishments is matched only by the control we surrender when choosing tasting menus in our expensive restaurants.

Paul is also irritated by our provincial use of words. In the United States, for example, entrée means the main course, while in France and Britain it means what we would call an appetiser. A French meal might therefore consist of an entrée, or starter, a main course, or plat, and dessert, whereas the corresponding American meal would consist of an appetizer, an entrée, or main course, and dessert. Since entrée originally comes from French and literally means “entrance”, we Americans must at some point have corrupted the meaning of the word, as Paul once suggested over dinner.

Paul’s hypothesis seems reasonable, and since he also complains about my knife-and-fork etiquette—it turns out that I do not align my fork…

[END OF TRANSLATED EXCERPT. The final sentence was unfinished in the source.]

[NOTES COMMENTING ON THE SOURCE.]

Daniel Jurafsky explains with great wit how restaurants manipulate us through language.

A brief account of the concepts

Key concepts

• Grice’s rule (conversational maxims) British philosopher Paul Grice formulated a rule: people say only what makes sense in the given context. Applied to menus: if a restaurant says an apple is “ripe”, there is reason to suppose that it might have been unripe. We do not state the obvious for no reason. An expensive restaurant would not think of writing “ripe tomatoes” or “fresh fish”, because in an establishment charging hundreds of dollars, freshness is assumed. Mentioning it would only create suspicion.

• “Status anxiety” This concept explains why mid-range restaurants love filler adjectives such as crispy, juicy, zesty and fresh. They are uncertain of their high status and fear that customers will consider their food mediocre. They therefore “bend over backwards” and protest too much through their wording. Elite restaurants do not experience this anxiety; their menus are minimalist.

• An indicator of overpayment If you see “exotic” on a menu, know that an unjustified mark-up has already been built into the price.