/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>15416443
The menu should include all of the dishes that the restaurant regularly sells, unless they want to have a secret menu as a marketing gimmick.

>>15416443
The dishes that should be included are whatever dishes the establishment wishes to include. What a restaurant serves isn't for the customers to decide. If you want pad thai in an Italian restaurant maybe go fuck yourself.

dishes should be based on whatever ingredients are available fresh and ideally local.

Not too hot. EXTRA chocolate. Shaken, not stirred.

>>15416443
No pictures and summarized descriptions.

>>15416465
What if the proprietor of the italian restaurant wants to cook pad thai?

>>15416443
The best menus are simple to read and contain a limited number of well-made dishes. They should also be tailored to whatever you're doing.

Have a cocktail list of ACTUAL cocktails, not millennial shit for instagramming.
And so help me, the olives in your dirty martinis need to be stuffed with blue cheese. I will literally go out of my way to patronize an establishment that does such.

>>15416443
I'm preferential to smaller menus.
Most people want a wide variety of options when they go out to eat, but I'd prefer a restaurant that makes 5 dishes over 50.
Chances are, they're better at making those fewer dishes significantly more consistent than they would trying to make a shitload of things constantly.

>>15416541
>actual cocktails
>dirty martinis
Why. What's wrong with you.

>>15416541
any bar can make classic cocktails why the fuck would you waste money printing a menu for it?

>>15416547
Depends on the restaurant. If it's a pub, yeah, then I want a few good things on the menu and not just a photocopy of the Sysco catalog.

On the other hand if it's a Vietnamese restaurant or something, it's fine to have 200+ items on the menu because they'll all be variations on a few categories.

>>15416443
Make it a magazine that has always been in the office that no matter how you're feeling, you can always flip through it. Clean them and replace them constantly. That and shutters are how I truly denote a quality establishment. If they take care of those. They probably take care of my food. Assumingly. You notice more when they dont I guess.

>>15416443
Why dont you strip it all to basics and have the ingriendents to pick, style to cook. profit.

>>15416555
You’re already printing a menu. Stop going to print shops that charge by the word.

>>15416541
you know, ive been to a load of bars that actually have those cocktail ordering guides on the side, but these same bartenders struggle to understand what I want when I order a cuba libre.
It'd just be better if bartenders at least memorized the menu's they serve.

>>15416565
you obviously have never worked in the industry. back of house vs front of house are different worlds

>>15416580
right...so in your grease addled brain every restaurant needs to be cheesecake factory?

Does anyone else think showing your prices is an act of confidence in quality? Does hiding the price get more money by tricking or lose money by making our dining experience an endeavor that has a buyer's remorse connotation to its sales platform?

>>15416589
what the fuck is a cuba libre you dumb faggot? you mean rum and coke with a lime?

>>15416601
imagine being mad at a name. you had to google that, didnt you anon?

>>15416590
Splain? Any of it.

>>15416609
well the kitchen does the own thing. if the fucking blinds aren't cleaned that's not the fucking chef's fault nor does he even give a shit.

>>15416485
Agreed.

Balance is important for me in a menu. There can be a difference in main ingredients but I prefer that there is a balance line there between the mains for example; not curry and spaghetti. If you try to be everything then you will never become good at something.

Also personally the difference quality is also visible if your mains come with the exact same sloppy side dishes: fries, majo, some grocery store salad with one slice of tomato and cucumber. Compare that to having a main dish that has its own vegetables and style of potato's that balance the meat and another that has a slight variation. The only way similar side dishes are acceptable to me is if people put effort in it but most of the time they do not.

>>15416596
Does your restaurant feature a gorillion varieties of assembly-line cheesecake? Then yes, it should be.

If your menu uses 'entree' to refer to mains, I'm going to laught at you when you're not looking, and I'll think you're a bit stupid

>>15416607
i'm not mad at the name. i'm just calling you a dumb faggot for expecting some 20-year-old chick to be a fucking mixologist.

>>15416636
no i mean cheescake factory has like 6 gorillion items on the menu but the last time i looked at their menu was when the pharma rep hottie was buying lunch

>>15416638
>mixologist
Oh I'm fucking sorry, I have to start saying ingredients to the bartender for every common drink?
Not everyone is as retarded as you are.
>"Hey, I'd like an old-fashio- oh shit my bad. Its the drink thingy with the bourbon and the bitters and durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

>>15416601
>you expect a professional maker of drinks to know what they’re called, dumb faggot?
Yes. If I have to list the ingredients, I’d rather he just hand me the shit because it means I’ll make a better one myself.

>>15416668
liquor+mixer+garnish is a common drink order you limp dick turbo faggot

>>15416638
>expecting some 20-year-old chick to be a fucking mixologist

Gen-XLord here, when I was 20 and working a bar, I'd have been sacked for not knowing what a Cuba libre was.

>>15416694
you never worked in a bar you faggot. the retarded shit bartenders and servers do every day would even surprise a mongoloid like you

>>15416703
>you know the name of drinks better than i do
>therefore it is obvious you haven't worked in a bar

>>15416725
if you order a cuba libre by name at the bar you are 100% a limp wristed turbo faggot

>>15416733
If you keep asserting that no one knows one of the most common bar drinks on this planet, you'll keep looking retarded.

>>15416745
ok go ahead and order a cuba libre...see how far the bartender's eyes roll back in their head

>>15416755
Are you old enough to be in a bar?

>>15416787
are you old enough to be on the internet?

>>15416703
Clearly you haven’t either.
Otherwise you’d know that you’ll take my order, and if you don’t recognize the name, instead of asking me how to do your job you’ll look it up in the little drink-mixing reference any bar is going to have behind the counter.
And if it’s something you’ve never made before, and you aren’t an unprofessional piece of shit, you’ll say so when serving it and ask me to taste it.

>>15416443
4 choices of meals based on seasonal ingredients that you get from reputable sources, including at least one vegan option.
Meal rotation keeping in mind the most popular ones so that you can bring them back whenver the ingredients are available.
Single page, clear cut and simple.
No cursive or comic sans.

>>15416601
It's the absolute bare minimum of knowledge a bartender should have. Don't ever be proud of being a dumbass, strive for better.

>>15416806
>t. consumes vast quantities of spit and cum whenever goes out

>>15416821
This sounds good. By rotation, you mean per week/month?

>>15416514
Yes that is one of the things im asking too.

For example, if I am really good and making fried rice and pizza should I make a fried rice and pizza place and check what would the best side dishes for them be, or just choose one of them? I guess i am just not good at choosing.

>>15416547
I guess youre right, Will start simple and go from there.

>>15416443
Grilled cheese MUST be on the menu

>>15416866
If you want to cook things that don't really go together, just open a pub and cook all kinds of comfort food.

If I went to an Italian restaurant and saw one Asian dish among a dozen Italian ones, I'd never order it because it would likely be a frozen entree from Sysco or something, since it requires so many different ingredients from everything else on the menu. If I went to a pub and they had pad thai, pizza, and burgers, I'd assume that a similar level of care was being put into each thing, and that the chef specifically wanted to cook those things.

>>15416866
Yup, rotation by week or month depending on how creative you are with meals and how often your market gardener changes his veggies.

>>15416443
There should a section of the menu to include items for children. At the very least it should contain chicken nuggets/fingers, macaroni and cheese, and french fries.

>>15416443
You want to keep the menu fairly concise, because a huge menu necessarily drags down quality and is super hard on the kitchen, but you want a range of options for each 'course' and options for any major dietary restriction with minimal alterations, ie at least a few things for each course that are or can be easily made gluten free, vegan etc. You want your menu to be cohesive- everything on it should feel like it belongs together, both stylistically and in terms of quality. Dishes don't necessarily have to be from the same ethnicity/region but they should share enough aspects that they don't feel like a mishmash. Over time you'll develop a house 'style' and potential dishes will just automatically feel right or not.

Ideally, dishes should be based on what ingredients are at their best, which means frequent changes- if done well this is a great thing, as it keeps the menu interesting and keeps people coming back. Be willing to stop using an ingredient when the quality starts to go down rather than when it's no longer available. The tail end of the season of any given ingredient often has a few weeks or more where the quality starts to tail off, so keep an eye on the product you're getting.

>>15418242

If I walk into a restaurant with a big menu, I wonder how much of their food isn't fresh.

I remember one restaurant that closed a few years ago that had an enormous menu. It was a Mexican food place but had an Italian section of the menu. One day my brother's wife ordered something from the Italian section and the waitress said that nobody had ever ordered it before and so they didn't have it.

>>15416443
kids love big fat fucking menus that are heavy
adults love elegance and easy to read shit
fuck all the rest who are trying to feel too fancy - but a variation of lunch and dinner menus styles would be cool. and lunch will always be fancier than dinner because lunch can include brunch which includes breakfast and breakfast is the most important meal of the day

>>15416725
Holy shit, is this real?

>>15416494
God that elf bitch was such a cocktease.
Classic Christmas B movie.

>>15420634
She's seeing someone in wrapping.