Waiter, The Pages Of This Menu Are Stuck Together

How do some restaurants have themselves on to such a degree without any sense of embarrassment?

I went for lunch yesterday at a city bar / pub called The Morrison, on the corner of Grosvenor and George Sts. It used to be called The Brooklyn, but it’s been done up and seems to be under new management. Although the layout is basically unchanged, there is a new and much pricier menu.

Other than the portions being on the small side for the price and venue, no complaints regarding the food. The meals were tasty, with quality ingredients and balanced flavours. There’s a good wine list. Apart from one incidence of not listening, the service was fine, which it would bloody well want to be when I’m paying $26 for a smallish bowl of crab linguine in a glorified pub.

The highlight of the meal however, was our amusement at the pretentiousness of the menu. There was the more obvious and standard onanism of $20 salads, with a “hen’s egg”. Thankyou for telling me it’s an ordinary egg: I was expecting one from a peacock or a cassowary for $22.

But for the piece de resistance, look about halfway down the left hand side and you’ll see

FLIGHT OF HAMS $28    a study of three cured hams

What sort of tosser would write something like this on a menu and expect to be taken seriously?

A study, no less? Pigs flying. If the hams were pressed, I could understand:

A pane of glass would be brought out, then three waiters would in turn press their bums up against it. The diners would stroke their beards with thumb and index finger while contemplating these pressed hams and saying: ”How true … how true”, then fork over $28 each as the price of this morsel of enlightenment.

Get over yourselves … you don’t even have Resch’s on tap.

A different genre of culinary onanism is having a wanky name.

There's Darlighurst's Sel Et Poivre, which markets itself as "The original French bistro of Sydney since 1998!", exclamation mark included.

Of course, there were no French restaurants in Sydney prior to 1998. I seem to remember eating only a few hundred yards away at Mere Catherine more than a decade before Sel Et Poivre opened, but perhaps the owners are secretly Belgian.

If you're going to have a French restaurant, try a little harder than translating "Salt and Pepper" into French in a lame attempt to make it sound chic. How about "Les Deux Conards"?

The greatest pretence is to transparently pretend its absence. That distinction goes to Food & Plonk on Sydney's upper North Shore, which I believe has now closed.

The name had always turned me off, but a friend who had dined there several times suggested we go. The food was good enough and they had a quality wine selection, although both were overpriced for the physical environment of the restaurant; hardly a massive rent to support.

But the name ... It sounds like Bowral foodie wankers:

"None of that inner city bullshit here. We're just FOOD and PLONK. That's what we're all about: food and wine. No poncy fluff with us genuine, down to Earth foodies!"

If only it had been true ... they would have called it something else.

I can imagine the wife talking to some of her North Shore / Bowral 4W Driving friends: "Oh yes, Bruce likes to think he's a bit of a rough diamond with his use of the vernacular."

Addendum: The head chef's name was actually Chris and he was from England, but that's beside the point.