10 ideas
Cheaper restaurants offer long lists of dishes and promise food 'prepared your way.' Expensive ones hand control to the chef through a daily selection or a fixed prix-fixe menu. At the top end, giving up choice is part of what the customer pays for.
Like languages, cuisines run on implicit rules that set the order of a meal and which flavours may go together. These rules explain why foreign foods are reshaped on arrival: they must become 'grammatical' before locals will accept them.
On menus, the average length of the words describing a dish tracks its price: each extra letter is associated with a measurable rise in cost. Fancier vocabulary works as a price signal, so you can roughly estimate a bill by counting letters on the menu.
The words 'you' and 'your' show up far more often on cheaper menus. Courting the diner directly is a habit of the low and middle market, while high-end menus keep the focus on the kitchen.
Everyday food names like ketchup, macaron and salad preserve traces of old trade routes and early global exploration. Tracing a word's path through language recovers the path the food itself took through cultures.
When a food enters a new cuisine, it gets changed until it fits local tastes, and often keeps only its name. Ketchup began as a pungent fermented fish sauce from south China and became a tomato condiment over 400 years in the West.
China was not an isolated backwater dragged into prosperity by Europeans. British, Dutch and Portuguese explorers set out because they wanted a share of the busy trade already running in East Asia.
Borrowing between culinary cultures goes back centuries, so 'globalisation' and 'fusion' in food are old patterns rather than new inventions. The ordinary snacks and soups we eat already carry this long history of exchange.
Because foods have always travelled and mixed, learning other people's ways of eating can help build a secular, multicultural community. A shared table can loosen the narrow loyalties of religion and ethnicity.
Casual-dining chains have their own menu language that stresses taste and preparation only in broad, general terms. Filler words like 'rich' and 'crispy' carry hidden meanings because they are what a menu reaches for when it has nothing specific to say.