Looking forward to your regular no-nonsense burger or fish and chips at your local mid-range chain restaurant? You'll probably need to translate their increasingly pretentious menu descriptions first. Luckily Newsbiscuit has done some of the work for you, so you can relax and enjoy your naked fries and foraged mushrooms. Don't forget to leave room for an old-school dessert.
'Triple-cooked' - applied exclusively to chunky chips, this is an attempt to get across the labour of love that deep frying, roasting, and then flash-frying sliced potatoes entails. Triple-cooked has become the new minimum standard for chips, in the same way that giving 110% effort in a game of football or an episode of the Apprentice is a basic requirement. Indeed, just this weekend, Beefeater has announced its new range of 'octuple-cooked' fries.
'Drizzled with' - it is a little known fact that under bistro regulations in place since 2015, any food item accompanied by an oil-based product or suspension must be applied as a drizzle, rather than being dolloped or squirted onto a food. 'Infused with' is allowed as an alternative, particularly where the restaurant is looking to invoke Heston Blumenthal in its presentation of a piece of bread with a bit of olive oil.
'Curated by our executive chef' - increasingly applied to cheese boards, to give the false impression that your choice of cheddar cheese and stilton is not just whatever is left at the back of the restaurant fridge, but instead reflects a 10-year journey of discovery from your devoted chef, involving a PhD in fromage studies, the personal milking of cows, and years away from the restaurant, doggedly separating curds from whey.
'Catch of the day' - sometimes accompanied by the additional explanation of 'whatever our fisherman have trawled today' this leaves you excitedly anticipating some tender whitebait, a large Dover Sole, or perhaps a glistening silver trout. Disappointingly, it seems that the fisherman's trawl today, yet again, is a scabby piece of haddock.
'Barista-style' - your coffee is Barista-style in the sense that your waiter personally scoops some Mellow Birds into a cup, decants some semi-skimmed milk into it, and then adds finishing touches with a bespoke metal frother - or teaspoon as it is better-known.
'Artisan/rustic' - your bread definitely hasn't been made by a poorly paid zero hour contract worker on an assembly-line in Rochdale run by some faceless global multinational. Oh no, we want you to think it has been hand-crafted by some 60 year old Italian villager, who has spent his life perfecting his trade and kneading dough in his leathery but skilled hands in a small workshop. Ignore the blue Warburtons packaging you can see your waiter throwing in the bin - that's just a coincidence.
'Farm to table' - the meat in your burger has come...from a farm...to a table. Thanks for that.
image from pixabay