The longer the description of an item on a menu, the more expensive it’ll likely be. In The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, Stanford University linguist Dan Jurafsky shows that with each extra letter in a menu description, the price goes up about 69 cents. For a really comprehensive collection of menus, from the earliest Chinese American restaurants to old cruise ship menus, we recommend the New York Public Library’s menu database. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pricey Menu Items”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Think about the last time you ate in a restaurant.
Now picture the menu. Did it use words like fresh or delicious or flaky?
Or was it really specific like Monterey Bay squid and wild copper river salmon with rosemary thyme polenta?
Chances are if the description of the food was that detailed, you were probably in a more expensive restaurant.
And of course, there’s no surprise there. But now we have data to back that up because there’s a linguist at Stanford named Dan Jarofsky.
And he and his colleagues analyzed a database of 6,500 restaurant menus across the United States describing 650,000 dishes.
And when they crunched all that data, they found that, quote, every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 69 cents in the price of that dish.
Whoa! Big words mean big money.
That’s right. Those are some expensive adjectives, right?
Mm—
So there really is such a thing as $5 words, right?
And he and his colleagues report this in a new book that’s called The Language of Food, A Linguist Reads the Menu.
And a couple other things they talk about include the fact that if you’re saying fresh and delicious on a menu, those are described as status anxiety words.
If you’re in an expensive restaurant, you’re not going to have to say that, right?
If you have to talk about it, if you have to say so.
Right.
So if you say fresh, you probably are in the drive-thru at Wendy’s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the other thing about it is that the more expensive restaurants are 15 times more likely to describe where the food comes from.
Very good.
Yeah.
You know, if you want to get deep into how menus have changed over time, I recommend going to the New York Public Library’s menu database where they have 17,289 menus with more than 1,200,000 different dishes.
What?
Yeah, it’s crazy.
Oh, my gosh.
So they’ve got stuff going way back, more than 100 years, including gentlemen’s clubs, some of the earliest Chinese-American restaurants, cruise line menus.
The stuff you might have been, you know, one of the big famous ships that crossed the Atlantic every week.
That sort of stuff.
Really interesting stuff.
And a lot of it is Plainsville.
I mean, you would go to a fancy restaurant.
It would be something like porterhouse with egg, you know, and you’re like, that’s it.
Yeah.
There’s no extra adjectives.
Yeah.
There’s no drizzled with a sauce.
It’s interesting because there may be a trend to go the other way among expensive restaurants now.
Some of them are getting so minimalist that they’re giving you the menu afterward as a souvenir.
So, you know, it’s just like you just sit back and say, OK, hit me, chef.
If you’ve seen something crazy on a menu, either just too elaborate or too funny or just completely wrong, give us a call.
Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.
