America's National Dish: The Style of Restaurant Menus

Abstract

The American inclination to substitute affect for content, showmanship for information, has been variously noted and lamented. Our purpose here is not merely to add to this literature; rather, we propose to examine the American restaurant menu as a genre, to show the conventions that govern its form, and to investigate the menu register as a solution to conflicts between the diverse aims of menus. Our study is based on a sample of about 200 menus (from restaurants in a variety of price ranges, offering many different sorts of food, in diverse regions of the United States and Canada)1 and on material specifically designed to instruct restaurant owners in the writing and layout of menus (Dahl 1945, Hoke 1954, and especially Seaberg 1973), a rich source of advice and of hundreds of illustrative menus beyond our own sample. Our study indicates that the language of American restaurant menus presents information about food, whether familiar or unfamiliar, in certain standard formats and in wording recognizable as restaurant advertising. Regional variation is negligible, and the major difference in menus from restaurants varying in price is the amount of descriptive material: some of the most expensive and some of'the cheapest can dispense with the descriptions. In the following discussion, we examine the relationship between the form of menu entries and the functions they are to serve, and then we consider some specific instances of characteristic menu style.