Pre-Weekend Wordery: The Adjectival Kitchen Sink
Ezra Klein shares this:
A friend of mine used to say that the rhetorical separation between good food and bad food came down to adjectives. Onion omelet? Pass. Caramelized onion omelet? Sure. Chicken? What do you mean, chicken? Roast chicken? Sure. Vegetable salad? Yawn. Spring vegetable salad? I’ll take a look. And it’s easy to go on: Potatoes vs. roast potatoes, fish vs. seared tuna, beans vs. farmers market fava beans.
There are a lot of vegetables (and assorted other non-meat items) that can be prepared in a lot of different ways. But if you’re not interested enough in the dish to explain what’s in it and how it was made, it’s a pretty good signal to potential buyers that it’s not very good. You don’t see menu items labeled “meat” and you shouldn’t see menu items labeled “veggie.” It’s like a large, blinking, sign: “THIS WILL NOT TASTE VERY GOOD.”
No doubt it’s true: adjectives are often helpful. But not always! My complaints about contemporary menu drafting are more often in the opposite direction: way too much quasi-descriptive embellishment.
I’ve come to think the adjective-seared jumble-aya of today’s menus is also a pretty good signal of a dish (or restaurant) to avoid. It’s as if contemporary menus are caught in some kind of rococo arms race, with each item buried deeper in modifying phrases than the last, to the point where it becomes a serious challenge to identify the noun portion of the meal. You know, something like: Applewood hickory-infused rosemary pine nut glaze reduction with lavender herb encoarsened fair trade sea salt and bianco Lombardo-Piranesi asparagus with ground truffle remoulade simmered in extra virgin vine-ripened Gaioli-in-Chianti and peppered 6-month chevre over a bed of wild, first shade harvest Guyana mache.
Surely there’s some middle ground here. I mean, there must be a point at which modifier gumbo becomes counterproductive in piquing our appetites.
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