Pleasure principles
Stephen Bull, former owner of the Lough Pool Inn and partner of the Hole in the Wall in Little Wilbraham, Cambridgeshire, offers his ideas on writing menus
A menu delivers a message. How it is presented and what it says are all part of how your food offer comes across. For any landlord who wants to increase the value of his pub's eating experience, it makes sense to make the menu work for you. It should prime you for the pleasure to come and help make your pub special. A laminated list of predictable, non-seasonal pub fixtures such as brie wedges, chicken Kiev, battered cod and pie of the day is not inviting and hardly differentiates you from the place up the road. So, take some trouble.
1 Present it attractively and clearly (easy with a computer or on a blackboard).
2 Don't offer too many dishes (it's a dead giveaway that the freezer is heavily involved); be careful with your spelling and punctuation; avoid "raised on sun-drenched pastures" hyperbole, and you're halfway there.
3 Don't make descriptions too short or too long. Write just enough to be interesting, though not so much as to induce ingredient fatigue, just be sure to include the important elements. "Venison liver and swede" and "Squid and fennel" don't do it for me, but there's a fashionable restaurant in London that gets away with it. There are Michelin-starred places that are only a bit less brutal, but where you might be surer of eating well.
4 A few too many ingredients can be as unhelpful: "Pan-fried fillet of red mullet with creamed penne pasta, peas, broad beans, asparagus, rocket, chilli, anchovy, flat parsley and breadcrumbs" (and I quote). Just reading this is exhausting. Sometimes, though, most of the parts will need to be listed; for example, Moroccan spiced lamb kebab with almond and raisin couscous and tzatziki, or chestnut mushroom stroganoff with saffron rice and soured cream - it's worth adding the soured cream even though some people might know it's an essential part of a stroganoff, as each of the elements mentioned shouts flavour.
5 Go for concise writing rather than brevity, and identify the important ingredients: fish pie (cod, salmon, prawns and crab) with Cheddar cheese mash and spinach; pear, ginger and butterscotch crumble with banoffee ice cream. Try to make standard dishes more attractive by putting them with supporting acts that offer a slight twist; for instance, haddock and leek fish cake with lettuce and shrimp butter?
6 Let the important parts of the dish stand out. Baked home-made Seville orange and ginger cheesecake with honey ice cream and marmalade sauce sounds terrific. But cut out a couple of non-essential words and the description is tauter. The "baked" doesn't really add anything and the "home-made" bit could be left out - does it mean the honey ice cream isn't? We're after promising flavour combinations so that each dish seems greater than the sum of its parts.
7 As more and more customers want to know where their food comes from, it's well worth quoting a supplier or place of origin: Cromer crab, Little Wilbraham beef, Cornish lemon sole, Madgett's Farm duck and so on. If the chicken or pork is free range, say so.
8 Make it difficult for customers to choose - then they'll have to come back to try something else - and they'll be the happier for it.
