Tag Archives: menus

10/15/23

Late Thoughts on Menus

This week’s readings on Cookbooks and Menus were honestly thrilling reads. As I have shared in class, I am very passionate about food and the food industry, having worked both back of the house in the kitchen and front of house as a server for over 5 years. One particular point I really enjoyed from Gora’s reading is the mention that menus are contracts of sorts, that lay out what customers can expect from a given restaurant. I had never thought of menus this way, as contacts, but it’s true. I am realizing that menus are also grounds upon which the customer-staff power dynamics are played out: they protect me as the server by providing me a guideline that I cannot deviate from, and they protect the customer by informing them about allergens, ingredients, and often, restaurant policy (ie, often menus will have fine print saying “gratuity automatically applied to groups over X”, etc.).

It was also fun to do the activity with the Alimentaria Mexicana menu. Our in-class discussion and Tamara sharing about the fancy restaruant she went to in Mexico City (I’m sorry, I forgot the name!) made me think about this restaurant I have been hearing about in El Salvador. It’s a new restaurant called El Xolo / El Xolo Maíz / El Xolo – Maíz Criollo (all the same place folks!). Here is their website.  It is located at MUNA, the National Museum of Anthropology, in one of San Salvador’s nicest, safest, richest neighbourhoods. The restaurant is currently #91 in the Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants list. The title of the website is “El Xolo – An Homage to Criollo Maíze and to Local Produce”, and their ‘About’ section speaks of using ingredients originating from indigenous Salvadoran communities, “removing intermediaries to create a direct impact in our producers, dignifying their work and supporting them in the development of better agricultural practices.”

I have never been to El Xolo, but I would like to. I have heard that they have a set menu for each night, and that a dinner meal costs about $50 usd, plus any extras and drinks. Although I commend that they even mention respecting and supporting indigenous producers on their website, as this is not usual in Salvadoran society, their prices do not create a welcoming feeling to the average Salvadoran. Indigenous communities in El Salvador are largely overlooked, and live mostly in rural, poverty-stricken regions. It makes me wonder, who is the tartget customer base for this restaurant? Is it upper-class Salvadorans who often descend from the same oligarch families that have contributed to the displacement of indigenous communities and dispossession of indigenous lands to grow coffee plantations? Or is it the foreign visitors who stay at the Sheraton Presidente hotel, located just minutes up the street from MUNA? I do not think it’s Salvadorans, and much less indigenous or rural communities, who often receive just around $50 usd as their monthly government pension.

Check out El Xolo and tell me what you think. How does their website compare to the Alimentaria Mexicana’s website, especially given the context of each restaurant? Would be interesting to hear your thoughts.  See you all in class soon!

10/7/23

Menu literacy and inclusion

As I was reading through “Cookbooks as Historical Sources” many ideas were bouncing around in my head in relation to my own experiences in restaurants.  Before moving to Vancouver, I worked at an Italian restaurant run by Greeks. I had never really thought much of the menu as I had it all memorized and could recite it like a robot. The menu itself lost meaning to me once I started working at the restaurant. 

After reading the article, I took a second to reflect on the value of the menu. I realized how much about the restaurant a diner could learn from looking at the menu. Many of the dishes on the menu were written in Greek and many of the dishes also included ingredients you wouldn’t see in Italian food (or what I think of as Italian food) like gyro meat. The restaurant itself is not advertised as a Greek-Italian fusion, but if you look at the menu it makes it apparent that the restaurant is run by Greeks. 

Not only did the article making me take a second to reflect on my own experiences with menus, what also caught my attention was the idea of examining ethnicity and class within menus. 

The two ideas certainly intersect in the restaurant industry both on and off the menu. 

I don’t go out to eat very often and neither does my family. But growing up I remember a lot of my friends’ families (who were wealthier)  taking me out to eat with them. We would go to these “boujee” restaurants as if it was a casual outing.

I remember how stressed I would become when looking at the menu and realizing that every dish on it was foreign to me, or the language used were words I had never heard. I remember looking around the table and everyone else was chatting and nodding in regards to the food, I felt very left out. It felt like a secret elite club meeting and I was simply a visitor. 

Menus and restaurants can easily exclude people. Even though segregated restaurants are now deemed to be non-existent, there are other factors that prevent EVERYONE from attending a restaurant. The culture a restaurant creates can be appealing to others while unappealing to the rest. Whether it be price, cuisine, location and staff, all these factors contribute into what population of people dine at a certain restaurant. The people who dine at a restaurant also contribute to the creation of the restaurant’s culture. This puts a limit on the extent that people can grow their food vocabulary and mingle with people of other cultures and classes.