Menu mind games

This article is the archived version of a report that appeared in the June 2009 Consumer Reports magazine.

Anyone who has been to a pricey restaurant has seen the highfalutin language: "cappuccino of forest mushrooms" for mushroom soup (Per Se, in New York City); "fork crushed" potatoes for mashed (The Foundry on Melrose, in Los Angeles); squab that is of the "rare Moroccan" variety (Gary Danko, in San Francisco).

Such terms are fun to read, but before forking over your hard-earned dough, be aware that they have a more serious side. When the description is elaborate, diners typically see the food's quality as higher and will pay more for it, says Darren Tristano, executive vice president at Technomic, a food-service research and consulting firm in Chicago.

Brian Wansink, author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think," agrees. He conducted a study in which cafeteria patrons were served identical dishes with slightly different names: "seafood fillet" and "succulent Italian seafood fillet," for example. Fancy lingo boosted sales by 27 percent, and customers judged those foods higher in quality.

Separating the baloney from the meaningful can be hard. Jennifer Purcell, associate dean of restaurant education and operations at the Culinary Institute of America, acknowledges that some descriptions are fluff—farm-fresh eggs, asparagus au jus, and seasonal vegetables, for starters. Terms that might matter, at least to hard-core foodies, fall into several categories:

• Place of origin, as in Tahitian vanilla.
• Breed or brand, as in Berkshire pork (an old breed given a fancy diet).
• Method of procurement, as in diver scallops (snagged by a human being, not a dragged chain).
• Foreign words, though they can become nonsensical when gussied up. (Fumet is a concentrated stock, but what's "thyme fumet essence"?)

Some menu terms are regulated by federal, state, and local laws. If a menu says a steak weighs 10 ounces, fish is fresh (not frozen), and pie is homemade (from scratch, on site), those claims have to be true or the restaurant could be fined thousands of dollars. But Purcell admits that "there are no menu police."