The Enigmatic Menu Trend

Cookwork's Perspective

Dare to be different! Trying to be clever? Undervalued expectations… Have you fallen into this trend? Please share with the community if this is successful for writing your menus. We found this article to get the discussion started.  Chime in and leave your comments below for the community to see...

Here’s Your Menu, Now Decode It

Cryptic menus — with minimal descriptions of each dish, such as a list of ingredients or worse, just adjectives, colors or even emotions — have been in vogue for nearly a decade in the West. The trend was led by the rise of molecular gastronomy, a cooking style where detailed explanations can get complicated.
It may be intimidating, for example, to read a menu about pea soup that has been “spherified” — a liquid is shaped into a sphere kept together by a thin outer skin, similar to caviar eggs — through a calcium and sodium alginate reaction to make a skinless ravioli. So on Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli restaurant menu, the dish is simply labeled “peas.”  Read more...

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