So, here you sit, tucked cozily in the trendy bistro du jour, contemplating your choices. Will it be mesclun with pancetta and duck confit tonight? Or something more substantial like osso bucco? And to finish? Hmmm, it's a tossup between the zabaglione and syllabub.
Wait a mouth-watering minute. . . .
Perhaps we nodded off in home ec class or missed an episode of Julia Child, but restaurant menus, it seems, now resemble gastronomic pop quizzes.
At one time, the most intimidating thing about them was the prices. You ordered beef, seafood or poultry. Chicken wasn't free-range, it was fried. Tomatoes weren't sun-dried or air-dried or oven-dried; they were grown. And nothing, so far as we can remember, was pan-seared.
Nowadays, diners have to be trilingual to read the fine print between the appetizers and dessert. There's proscuitto from Italy, tahini from the Middle East and clafouti from France.
Even simple things like bread have become new-fangled. Peek into the basket, and you no longer have white, wheat or rye, but focaccia, brioche or challah.
How did it all get so complicating -- and intimidating?
"I blame the '80s," says Mark Rose, manager of Paolo's at Harborplace. "Nobody wanted to run a normal restaurant anymore. Everybody was trying to dazzle with nouvelle cuisine. So people would spend $80 to have dishes and sauces they'd never heard of before."
At Paolo's, the service staff fields the most questions about the black pepper linguine (egg pasta sprinkled with black pepper), tapenade (a spread of eggplant, olives, garlic and olive oil) and the quattro formaggi (four-cheese) pizza.
It's simpler than it sounds. But Mr. Rose says some people err by making decisions without knowing what they're getting. One gentleman recently ordered fried calamari. When it arrived and he learned it was squid, he balked.
"This is what?" he asked. "I want something else."
Even when the customer is uninformed, he's still right in the service trade. The dish was whisked away and replaced with something more familiar: fried eggplant.
While complicated menus may represent culinary one-upmanship, restaurant consultant Diane Neas says that sophisticated ingredients and preparations simply mirror the wide variety of ethnic influences in food today.
