I would have paid a lot more attention in high school chemistry if "Br" stood for dessert brownie instead of bromine, and "Sm" was mesculun salad with honey mustard, not samarium. At the Miracle of Science bar and grill in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a normal paper menu is replaced with a chalkboard periodic table. Drinks are apparently served from beakers and tables resemble lab benches. MIT isn't too far away, so there's plenty of chic geeks drinking to their patron saint Dmitri Mendeleev. [via Laughing Squid]...
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Japanese restaurants already have the habit of displaying menus in the form of realistic plastic models to give customers a clear idea of what they're ordering. What's the next step? Tables with LCD touch screens that display 3-D pictures of the food. It's the future....
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-->If you knew each take-out menu you kept was worth $2, would you collect 10,000 of them like Daniel Rayas did for allmenus.com? Newsday profiles Rayas and his rise as a menu collecting master while scouring the streets of New York City and beyond. He's picked up a lot after four months of menu hunting, such as the best way to repair his worn-off shoe soles (cement), what the most common restaurant name is ("Great Wall"), and that Jamaicans don't believe in printed menus. Oh, and $20,000 for all the menus that he has collected, which allow him to live in the city and take care of his granddaughter. Europe may be his next menu-collecting destination. If only he...
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Former restaurant critic turned columnist Steve Cuozzo says that "Modern menus cheat, tease and sometimes lie outright." Cuozzo is talking about all the dishes he finds misdescribed on restaurant menus. "I've had boiled rice described as 'risotto' and dry shellfish masquerading as 'bouillabaisse'." His conclusion: "But most restaurants aren't out to deceive you—they just don't pay enough attention when choosing the actual words for the menu." I would agree and just add that often ignorance or lack of knowledge is to blame. What's the biggest "lie" you've ever seen on a restaurant menu?...
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I've always been annoyed by restaurants that can't be bothered to put their menus online, and I always knew I wasn't alone. From a recent letter to Eater LA's Complaints Dept: "I can't tell you how many restaurants I wanted to go to that have opened and closed before an online menu ever appeared on their website. I really think restaurants are stupidly missing a wonderful opportunity to sell themselves and their food by providing and up-to-date and complete menu. And don't just say the name of the item, describe it in detail. Sell your food, don't leave us guessing. I won't drive 20 miles to take a chance." But do you know what's worse than a restaurant that doesn't...
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The goal of the game was to order in one go, and so comprehensively that the server would not be forced to ask for even a single clarification. As such, every variable had to be examined, every corner of the menu explored, lest something—a complimentary glass of juice on a pre-set breakfast menu, for instance—go unnoticed.
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