One of the most annoying things to confront modern man are restaurant menus. Pub menus used to say things like "fish and chips" now they say things like "Fresh, Atlantic, line-caught cod lightly dipped in beer batter and pan fried to perfection with oven-baked, hand-picked Suffolk potatoes, cut into thick wedges etc etc.
This is annoying for a number of reasons: firstly it is written under the mistaken belief that it is seductive, it is as if the menu is trying to get you into bed, when all you want is fish and chips for dinner; secondly, these menus are always full of non-sequiturs and extraneous words, like "hand picked", "pan-fried" or "oven-baked"- how else would you pick something if not with your hands?
Recently I found an irritating example of this in a restaurant in Seattle. For a starter the menu had "Chef's whim of antipasto", which I suppose you can translate to "vaguely Italian bits and bobs that the Chef has lying around in the kitchen and feels like throwing on the plate." I immediately stormed out of the restaurant and found a canister of the finest machine-pumped petroleum, sourced from the deserts of the Middle East, doused the restaurant with liberal lugs before hand-lighting a match and flambeing the restaurant to a crisp. Ok, I didn't, I just tutted.
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