Menu Misnomers
Restaurants love peppering menus with chef jargon. Deciphering dish descriptions can be a challenge if you don’t know your charcuterie from your choucroute, especially when chefs feel free to reinterpret the established culinary lexicon on a whim.
Not long ago, a server described a seafood soup special that was “topped with crab tartare.” Tartare is supposed to mean seasoned and chopped raw beef (shown). Tuna, because of its steak-like quality, now commonly gets the tartare treatment and nametag. I can live with that. Crab, on the other hand, is considered less safe than most other seafood in its raw state.
When I questioned the server about it, he went back to the kitchen to inquire about the crab and returned to the table with the message that the restaurant would never serve raw crab. The dish’s title, he explained, was the chef’s interpretation of tartare.
Restaurant-goers these days are more motivated than ever to learn the lingo — if only chefs could agree on what these terms are supposed to mean.
Image, wikipedia.com