Definition:
An informal and often pejorative term for the specialized language (or jargon) sometimes used by restaurant employees and on menus (also called menuese or restaurant-speak).
Characteristics of restaurantese include euphemisms, circumlocutions, foreign words, and words with highly positive connotations.
See also:
Examples and Observations:
- "'You’re not getting it!' she said sharply, her face flushed with exasperation. 'We have been caught in our own home cooking.'
"'Home cooking'?
"She sighed. 'That’s restaurantese for throwing something back in the pot when it has fallen on the floor. Deceit. It means deceit."
(Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs. Bond Street Books, 2009) - "In formal settings, the past tense can be used for the present tense. At the end of the main course, a tuxedoed waiter in a fancy restaurant might ask a diner, 'Did you want some more coffee, ma'am?' The wrong answer is, 'I did, but now it's too late.' In restaurantese and, more generally, in very formal registers, the past tense substitutes for the present tense.
"In slightly less formal registers, the conditional is used instead of the present: 'Would you like some coffee?' Again, the wrong answer is, 'If what? Would I like it if what?'"
(Joel M. Hoffman, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning. St. Martin's Press, 2010) - "The subclassification of common nouns into mass and countable . . . is clear, but many nouns have both uses . . .. In some cases, one use is clearly secondary and limited in its use, e.g. the countable use of basically mass nouns in 'restaurantese,' e.g. an orange juice, two soups; here it seems more natural to speak of '(ad hoc) conversion.'"
(N. E. Collinge, ed., An Encyclopaedia of Language. Routledge, 1990) - "growing a beard. Restaurantese for food that has not been picked up from the serving line and is growing cold."
(Paul Dickson, Slang: The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms. Walker Publishing, 2006) - "Crunchy Frog" (Restaurantese in Monty Python)
"We use only the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple-smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose."
(Terry Jones in episode six of Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1969) - Frenchifying Menus
"Culinary euphemism is often motivated by the need to make something that is intrinsically unappetizing or mundane sound better by giving it a nice name. A scarcity of meat was perhaps the motivation for the description Welsh rabbit and also Welsh rarebit, a genteel variant of the name of this cheese dish that appeared in the 18th century. . . .
"Cookbooks, restaurants, and cafes sometimes offer fine examples of this kind of inflated language. Much of it is French-inspired vocabulary to connote culinary refinement. How much classier a meal becomes when a leek tart is changed to flamiche aux poireaux, oxtail to queue de boeuf and tossed salad to salade composée. Soup versus potage de whatever, stew versus casserole, slice versus tranche, aged versus affiné, swimming versus nageant, in aspic versus en gelée, reheated versus rechauffé--all distinguish the mundane from the elegant. . . .
"As the Zwickys illustrate in their glorious account of American restaurant menus ["America's National Dish," 1981], the language of 'restaurantese' can go to extraordinary lengths in the quantities of French dressing applied. Frenchifying a menu might simply involve a dash of token phrases like du jour and au added onto strings of otherwise English words. Turtle soup au Sherry and Split Filet of Tenderloin au Burgundy. Other linguistic condiments include au gratin and en casserole: Ravioli parmagiana, en casserole; Au Gratin Potatoes en Casserole."
(Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006)
Also Known As: restaurant-speak
