Menu Buzzwords You Can Ignore Because They're Mostly Meaningless
On the one hand, we really can't begrudge restaurants for adding a little fluff to their menus. It's not exactly easy to keep a restaurant open, and if declaring a hamburger to be "artisanal" helps move the needle even slightly, restaurateurs are likely willing to take a chance. But it reaches a point where it's a bit much, doesn't it? There's a fine line between a bit of hifalutin copy and a restaurant trying to pull a fast one on you.
The thing about menu copy (and just about any other food-related copy) is that there are a lot of words that don't have a legal definition. If you want to sell your bologna as "all-natural", it can't contain any artificial ingredients, but you can describe even something as nature-defying as Fruit Gushers as containing "natural flavors." It's not necessarily a sinister attempt to foist low-quality food upon you, but it does mean you need to take these descriptors with a grain of artisanal, handmade salt. (How can salt be handmade? Exactly.)
Various words that don't mean anything
| Artisan/Artisanal | This is a word that says more about what the restaurant would like you to think about the food than it does about the food itself. That's not to say that a pizza or whatever can't be artisan, but if you're getting it from Domino's, how artisan can it really be? |
| Award-winning | When something is genuinely award-winning — a regional James Beard award, for instance — that's seriously impressive. But even the larger awards, like the Great Taste Awards in the U.K., are imperfect, and there are ways to buy bogus honors. |
| Curated | Does your menu contain every conceivable option? If not, then congratulations: it's curated! Having a menu declare that its wine list (for example) has been curated generally implies that it's selected with care — to which we say, yeah, we sure hope it was. |
| Handmade/Handcrafted | What this really means is that human hands were, at some point, briefly involved in the process of making whatever food has been placed before you. It's even more farcical when it's applied to something like America's favorite vodka, Tito's — if something's really handmade, you won't be able to make enough of it to sell at Costco. |
| Homemade/Housemade | You know what else was homemade? Your aunt's boring, raisin-studded potato salad. And anyway, if you're at a restaurant, you're not at home, are you? |
| Local | The question is, local to where? Maybe those cremini mushrooms came right from the chef's backyard, or maybe they grew closer to the USDA guideline of "within 400 miles." Perhaps in the future, all food grown on Earth will be seen as local, as opposed to carrots grown on Mars or something. |