Your menu is probably the most important sales tool you have in your hospitality armoury. Guest’s can have seen it several times before they give their order to the front of house staff. You start to plan on where you want to go with your significant other for dinner. A quick search on Google finds the restaurant website, with the lastest menu available online. Next comes the front of the restaurant, with the dining choices in a glass case by the door and finally you get one in your hand as you are seated.

One trend is to give minimal description of a dish, which gets to the point but really does not help to tell the story of what arrives on the plate: How can:       egg * liquorice * tomato     sell the item?

I like a good tale, it adds warmth and depth to a product and introduces something beyond the mechanics of a list of ingredients. To help in building this romance on the plate, there are five dimensions that can add volume to what you are producing for your guests.

1 Source
Where does the ingredient come from?

2 Breed / Variety
A bit of additional detail about the ingredients. Steak is pretty anonymous, but Aberdeen Angus speaks of a more focused quality.

3 Storage
Fresh, aged or even live.

4 Which bit?
The cut or the preparation.

5 The method of cooking

How about:

A 28 day dry aged ribeye of Charolais beef from Smiths Farm in Nearby Village, cooked on an oak fired grill. Served with a parsnip puree and a red wine reduction.

Freshly ground, dark roasted Lintong beans from the Smith Estate in Sumatra.

Certainly more narrative than:

Cow – parsnip – sauce

Coffee

Oh … don’t forget to add the price too, more on that in a previous article 🙂