Osso Buco

Appears in

Published 1963

About

Why can’t restaurants write menus that really help? First of all, most menus are too full. To offer a choice of seventy different dishes is not really helpful to the diner. Nobody’s taste could be so jaded that they could not select a meal they want from a dozen or so alternatives. This embarras du choix, in fact, defeats all but the most practised, for the majority of people if faced by too wide a selection (and this is proved by statistics) embarrassedly plump for shrimp cocktail and steak.

I cannot see why at least some of the main dishes on each menu cannot be described in some detail. The White Tower in London and the Forum of the Twelve Caesars in New York have made quite a thing out of their poetic descriptions of the day’s specialities. But even a straightforward description of what is in a dish and how it is cooked would prove invaluable. So many people seem to be nervous of betraying their ignorance of what something is, particularly when they are young, that they stick to the same dreary things they have had before every time they eat out. And yet everyone has to eat every dish for the first time some time.