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...
The language of restaurant menus. Need a dictionary to get through a dinner menu? Research shows the longer the description of a particular dish, the more expensive it will be. Plus: What’s the best way to use a thesaurus? DON’T —...
In a previous episode, we came upon a word mystery in a 1947 menu from Jackson, Mississippi, that mentions tang. The mystery has been solved! It wasn’t the drink, and it wasn’t the fish; it was Cudahy Tang, one of over a hundred knockoff...
toothpick rule n.— «Even so, awareness of the new law is so high that Parven Pomper Vice President Alixandria Lapp, for one, made sure to run its reception menu by a lawyer before taking it to the caterers. Under what is known as the...
haute barnyard n.— «In accordance with prevalent Haute Barnyard motifs, the rooms of this West 69th Street restaurant are colored in hues of mossy green, and the walls decorated with photographs of giant, dewy farmer’s fruit. The menu is...
segue bar n.— «At Morandi, where the chef, Jody Williams, presides over a menu laced with plenty of smaller dishes mixed with showy platters of branzino or steak for two, the computer system has been redesigned to include something called...