Gained in Translation

I’ve always believed that the menu card is a wonderful way to get your first impressions of a restaurant, before you allow the chow to arrive and either confirm or refute those impressions. And for me, the sign of a fancier restaurant in a menu is not the thick white card, nor the matte finish, not the leather binding with embossed lettering:- It is the little descriptions of everything there is on offer.

Apart from making the place seem la-di-dah, I think its terribly practical, especially for Indian food. The most straightforward reason: To help the uninitiated eater choose what he wants. Indian food can be quite a web of regional names, and it can be difficult to figure out what to expect, without the translations to help! And more often than not, there’s a proliferation of superfluous names that one has to look past. If a place has on its menu, say, a chicken pahadi kebab, a kashmiri kebab, a banjara kebab, and a nawabi kebab, none of them really talk about the method of preparation or the spices which go in etc. (In restaurants which have countless numbers of such nondescript kebabs on their menu, I routinely wonder if they really make as many or just depend upon the customer sticking to the basic tikkas or seekhs. Some day I dream of ordering all of them and check if it puts them in a fix.) On the other hand, if these embellished names are accompanied by even a short list of the ingredients that go in (‘with cream and cashew paste’,etc) my suspicions subside. Also, it can bring down the need to ask the waiter, who can be a)condescending, as witnessed in a previous post, b)utterly clueless about what happens behind the closed doors of the kitchen or c)needlessly persuasive. Thirdly, I feel its human to appreciate something more once you know the influences that have gone in, or how painstaking it is for the chef. In a ‘ Chicken marinated in a yoghurt-based paste with cardamom and saffron, slow roasted in a coal tandoor’ ,I’m sure to detect the nuances of all these, which I probably would have missed if all the menu card said was ‘chicken someortheother kebab’. Taste, then, is gained in translation.

So descriptions and translations are helpful, but restaurants can get carried away. Especially if its one of those kinds of places, where you spend half your day reading the collection of essays that is the menu- (‘Mini medallions of veal with a hand-crushed red-and-black-peppercorn crust, with a three mushroom and Bordeaux sauce, served with a mushroom mousse, steamed asparagus with butter and our home-grown new potatoes) and what finally arrives occupies one eighteenth of the plate which, even with the daintiest of little morsels, is over in two and a half gulps. Entertaining, surely, but definitely not filling.
That lovable know-all, Bill Bryson, encounters a hotel in England in ‘Notes from a Small Island’ which specializes in these: ‘Fanned Galia Melon and Cumbrian Air Dried Ham served with a Mixed leaf salad’ and the like, and he’s bewitched. Lines from the book: ‘ I was greatly taken with this new way of talking and derived considerable pleasure from speaking it to the waiter. I asked him for a luster of water freshly drawn from the house tap and presented au nature in a cylinder of glass, and when he came round with the bread rolls I entreated him to present me a tonged rondel of blanched wheat oven baked and masked in a poppy seed coating’.

The next time you visit a restaurant, check the menu cards and the minute they seem to loquaciously rant on about the food, immediately give the waiter a solid piercing 'Who needs you!' look.