Restaurant menus

Go to a lot of hipster restaurants where dishes are described on the menus these days with abrupt, enigmatic lists of ingredients, like, "langoustines, pork fat, burnt apple." that's the dish.

Or, "brill, white asparagus, morel." I didn't make those up. Those are both real. Those are examples from a restaurant in London called Muse by celebrity chef Tom Aikens. Tom Aikens — Beardy McSpikyhair, Handsome McFootballer. Here's his description of the dessert: "chocolate, orange." That's it. Chocolate, comma, orange. Wouldn't it be awesome if he just brought you like a single Hershey bar and one Mandarin orange segment on top, and that's the dish.

The Daily Mail called this possibly "the most pretentious restaurant menu ever." Adam: I mean no hate on chef Aikens — no doubt, a great chef. And he is hardly the only chef doing this. Fancy restaurant menus have done a total 180 from a couple of decades ago, when the norm was florid, positively pornographic descriptions of the dishes. Those kinds of descriptions have moved on to fast casual dining. You're going to hear about an "erupting" dessert at Applebee's, in just a moment. Adam: This trend in how dishes are described on menus is just one of the phenomena documented by Dr. Alison Pearlman in her new book, May We Suggest: Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion. Dr.

Pearlman is an art history professor at Cal Poly Pomona. And to research this book, she ate at basically every restaurant in Los Angeles, which might seem like a small and/or limited sample, but this is Los Angeles we're talking about. So, nah, that's a huge and diverse sample. And here is some of what she has learned. Pearlman: A list of ingredients, the menus that have just a list of ingredients, are holding some information back from the guests, leaving a little mystery, hoping that they're They have a guest in mind when they leave that mystery with just a list of ingredients, they have a guest in mind, who wants to be surprised, how will the chef put together those ingredients? What will it look like? And this is the exact opposite of a menu description of dish that you might find, for example, in a casual dining chain, like Applebee's for example.

And in fact, I have a description to read to you that I have in the book of an Applebee's dessert, and we can really take a look at how this is constructed. Pearlman: So this is a dessert called, "triple chocolate meltdown." First of all, the title, then the description right under that, is this: "A magnificently moist chocolate cake. Its fudged-filled center will erupt upon first bite.

Served with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge." Now, let's take a look at this. This is a description that is designed to be very evocative, very sensuous. It's very textural. You've got descriptors like "moist" and then "erupt upon first bite." So it's all these textural descriptors in there. And it also tells you exactly what the dish will look like when you get it. So there's no mystery, even though there's a lot of sensuality that's designed there. Pearlman: The total opposite of that is a sort of hip vanguard, small plates menu restaurant that I went to called Ink. It's no longer there, but this is the dessert from that restaurant.

This is it: "mountain yam, caramelized white chocolate, popcorn, coconut." So this is poetry, it's enigmatic, but it's also very sensuous. It's the juxtaposition of those and the surprising juxtaposition. It's, oh, how are we going to put together popcorn with coconut? What's mountain yam? All of these things that are the opposite, there's a sense of mystery there.

Pearlman: So on the one hand with

The applebee's, we have a menu that wants to handhold.

It doesn't want the guest to be surprised, but it wants the guest to be tempted, just not surprised. On the other hand, we have a restaurant with mountain yam dessert that wants the guest to be surprised. The guest expects to be surprised. And so the menu lets that happen, and the guest can afford not to have choice.

I mean, this is the sort of irony right of the whole situation is when 40 or 50 years ago, it was a luxury to have all the choices in the menu, in the world. And now it's the great luxury to give up choice. Pearlman: And think about how many choices people are making all the time. You go to the supermarket, there's 50 different yogurts on the shelf. What a luxury to just hand over the responsibility for your meal to the expert, to the one who will undoubtedly please you with their artistry. Adam: Speaking of money, a topic you implicitly raised just then, I hadn't even really thought of it until you mentioned it in your book. The difference between a menu that shows its prices in just flat dollars versus 19.95s. Pearlman: The menu differences in terms of how prices are written in a menu tell you a lot about the type of restaurant.

In the 21st century, there have been multiple studies of menus, but also the opinions of diners and restaurateurs, what they think of when or what's associated with prices that end in 99 cents or 95 cents versus just a round number. And consistently the.95,.99 prices tend to be associated with less expensive restaurants, restaurants that are quick service, perhaps, like fast food type of restaurants, or just discounting in general. And that has a larger context to it. Pearlman: So restaurants are just, in that sense, part of a larger retail context, in which at least since the 1950s in the United States, you've had the association of.95.99 prices with discounting, so that association is very strong. When I studied menus, did a field study of menus, I found the biggest difference was between restaurants that had cents of any kind in the price, or were no cents at all. And of course, as you might expect, the restaurants with no cents tended to be higher price point than those without. Pearlman: But really how restaurants write prices on menus, generally, there's sort of two kind of stratagems for this. There's either a restaurateur wants their diners to notice the price and be convinced that the price is a good deal.

Or the restaurateur wants you to forget about price when you're looking at the menu. And those can involve very, very different tactics. Adam: I suppose an example that comes to mind would be, I think it's Alinea in Chicago, Grant Achatz's place, and they move toward a payment procedure that's completely different. Where, rather than paying by the dish, you buy a ticket as though it's a show. You pay upfront. You pay maybe months in advance when you book your seat at the show. And then that's the last conversation you have about money the entire night. Pearlman: The tasting menu format in general is probably the least price forward, but it's not even just about seldom mentioning the price or removing the price from the experience of the dining experience.

When you go actually visit the restaurant, you've already paid, you've paid a ticket, it's separated from the actual experience. So there's that the separation, but it's also, really, there's another thing going on with the tasting menu, and you can actually connect it to even fast food menus where bundling is involved. So basically a tasting menu is a bundle. It's saying, you're paying $300 ahead for nine or 10 courses of something. And those nine or 10 courses are unique.

They're incomparable.

You can't say $300 is too much

For what you're getting.

This work of art.

That's a unique thing, a list that you're not going to get anywhere else. Pearlman: Well, you could say the same thing about Burger King, doing a two for five dollar deal that you cannot compare to any other fast food restaurant, or even the deal that it makes the following week. Bundling is saying, look, this price for this combination of items, it's going to be unique and hard to compare with other offers. Adam: So when you see a menu with a lot of options on it, what does that tell you about the place you're eating? Pearlman: Let's say, the perfect famous example of this is the Cheesecake Factory, we have so many options. But you look at the menu closely, and you see that it's not just about the size of the menu, it's also about the scope of the menu. It's not just the number of things, but it's the variety. And what that tells us about The Cheesecake Factory is that this is a menu, this is a restaurant that's trying to satisfy many tastes. And it may mean that restaurant is typically, for example, an impulse visit.

Not necessarily something that a lot of people plan long in advance to go to. And so, let's say you're shopping in a mall where you often might see one and you're with a group of people. Everybody wants something different. Pearlman: And this is a place that satisfies what restaurateurs tours sometimes call the veto vote. It's the one who wants fish when everyone else wants steak. But, also, when you look at a menu with a lot of choices, consider for example, the classic diner menu, normally has a large menu, expect it to have a large menu. Lenny's Diner, you go in and you look at this menu, there's pages and pages of options. Look a little closer.

Usually, with the diner menu, it's very large, but there are sort of familiar categories where there are a lot of options within them. Maybe there's a whole page of burgers. Maybe there's a huge list of pancakes. Maybe you've got another bunch of egg dishes somewhere along the menu. Pearlman: And what you start to notice about that menu is it's size is a little bit of an illusion, because that menu has a lot of ingredients that cross over. In other words, they're buying a lot of eggs, they're buying a lot of beef for the burgers, and then they've got a lot of toppings that may be variety, but it's actually not as large of a menu, as you may think, when you see all these pages. Adam: I suppose another example of the sort of illusory huge menu would be your classic Chinese-American joint that has maybe even hundreds of options, but they're all very, very slight recombination of the same set of core ingredients. Are there examples of restaurants that you came across in your research where the menu was legitimately huge, lots of completely different dishes? Pearlman: Well, absolutely.

I mean, and there's a famous restaurant in Los Angeles called Jitlada, which is a Thai restaurant, a very acclaimed place. But they have a gigantic menu, at least 252 items, when I went there. And it's a famously long menu. Now, of course, there are a lot of crossover ingredients there, to make it practical. But at the same time, you also notice, when I went there, there were little plaques, throughout different parts of the restaurant that actually tempered the expectations of customers about how long their dishes would take. Saying, our food may take a while, but it's worth it. Pearlman: And people give them the benefit of the doubt, because they're so acclaimed. They have such a long story in Los Angeles.

People are willing to wait for very long time for their food.

So this is sort of an exceptional

Place with a long history.

And that's something, too, about the context of the restaurant, the history of a place, its reputation can also bring customers who know, who are prepared for whatever inconveniences they might bring you. It's worth it. Adam: Well, you could argue that the opposite of a very large menu is no menu at all. Places where you just walk in and whatever the chef is doing that night, that's what you're going to get. And you characterize this in your book as "the privilege of submission." Why do you view it as a privilege? Pearlman: The tasting menu is the menu of no choice. You might have a choice in drinks, but not in food.

The tasting menu is the privilege of submission for both the restaurateur and the diner. Privilege for the diner, because usually this is kind of a select group in terms of just the expense of going there. There's a privilege involved there. There is a willingness on the part of that audience to accept what the chef has to offer, a trust in the kitchen, a respect for the chef's cuisine, that they're willing to gamble on the meal. Pearlman: But for the restaurateur, also, it's a privilege, because there are very, very few restaurants, very few chefs that can afford, themselves, to only offer a tasting menu. So those places that only offer a tasting menu, nothing else, tend to be places where the chef has earned a reputation and that business can actually work, because they have a lot of not just local customers, but gastro-tourists who come and supply them with a number of customers all throughout the year.

Adam: So you think it's purely a feature of the era of celebrity chef? Pearlman: It requires submission to the chef, and the reputation of the chef. It requires that respect for the chef and the trust in that kitchen to say, you make the choices.

I trust you, bring me whatever you've got. And in fact, a kind of auteurism. This idea that the chef is an artist. You don't tell an artist what to do. It's a reverse of the past. It's a reverse of the past, in which the customer's privilege was the privilege of choice. Whereas, here, in this situation, the complete opposite has happened. Where it is, instead, the diner shows their sophistication by their choice of chef and the willingness to allow that artist to impress them.

Adam: Let's talk about other aspects of menus beyond the dishes that are offered on them. The materials, what does the material say to you when you go out to eat? If your menu is plastic or paper, or what else it could be nowadays. Pearlman: The choice of materials for a restaurant normally depend on two main sort of factors. One of them is how durable does your menu need to be? The other one is, what genre does the restaurant want to associate itself with? So think about plastic. Plastic is a material that is Whether it's a plastic cover, a plastic sleeve, a coating over paper, plastics are excellent ways of protecting a menu. And hat's why you tend to find plastic menus, especially the stiff and thick plastic menus in places that seldom change their menu. That maybe also have a lot of children visiting. Or there may be places also, where the genre that they're either trying to associate themselves with, like a bistro, for example, or a diner, even if it's a chefy, hip place might revert to plastic, because it's a genre expectation.

Pearlman: So there's that element of conventions and genre that's always part of the mix with choices of materials. But also this idea of durability. The trifecta of durability is the seldomly changed menu, the children visit the restaurant, and a long menu that needs to be protected.

Adam: So what if we look at

The opposite, a menu that is not durable in the slightest, the weakest of paper, what does that tell you about a restaurant, if you get one of those? pearlman: if you have a paper menu, that's just a piece of copy paper that's easily destroyed, you are most likely in a place that changes the menu frequently.

 

It's also a casual thing to do,

To have a menu that's just a common piece of paper, like a copier paper.

But there's such a universe of papers. There's such a universe of plastics. So we have, for example, what about a very textured, thick, hard, substantial card stock with a ragged edge? I mean, these are cues for luxury.

The texture of materials, even plastics can be very high end. Pearlman: There's one example of a restaurant that I went to as part of the study for my book, very high end, it was, at the time, one of the most expensive places in Los Angeles, it had a plastic covered menu, but this was no ordinary plastic. This was architectural vellum, which is essentially, it's what architects use for drafting, and it's a plasticized paper. So it's a kind of combination of polymer and paper, it's translucent, and it has a real texture, a sort of tooth to it. So it's an unusual plastic, and it has a textural quality that's very luxurious. So there's a luxury quality to that material. Plastics can be many faceted, as can paper. Adam: How about pictures versus no pictures? Pearlman: Pictures versus no pictures on a menu, some of that is cultural and genre.

Expect to find a lot of pictures on Asian menus of different varieties, no matter what the price point. It can be very, very high end, so we shouldn't necessarily simply associate pictures with common or even lower price menus, even though there are many of those. Adam: One thing that you mentioned in your book is in some of the earliest recorded restaurants in Song Dynasty, China, there was a practice of preparing dishes in advance, purely to display to the diners. Not for them to eat, but for them to look at, so that they could know what they were going to order. And that even that many centuries ago, people were finding ways to use restaurants and the manners around them to make each other feel small. And apparently people would sort of make fun of the noobs who would actually try to eat from the demonstration plates. Pearlman: Examples of real food, displays a real food, as well as pictures on menus can give a lot of information. They tell the diner what to expect.

And so they predominate in places that want to handhold the guest. They want to reassure them, don't be afraid. This is what you're getting. Of course, the challenge with a menu like that, when you do prepare the guest and say, this is what your meal will look like. Don't be afraid. What you're also doing is setting expectations. So beware, the restaurateur has to beware about what kinds of expectations they set, when they give pictures of dishes. Because then if they don't measure up, you have, of course, a disappointed guest.

Adam: Where do you see the industry going based upon your research, where you basically ate at every place in Los Angeles, multiple times? Where do you see trends pointing either in the sort of a budget industry bracket, or in a high-end bracket? Pearlman: The trends today are mostly being affected by the pandemic.

I mean, the things that are happening right now, there's so much that has changed in the restaurant business and menus, in particular. For example, we've seen a lot of menu simplification, and that's across the board in big fast food chains, but also in maybe some gourmet, hip type of places as well, single unit, multi-unit, all kinds of restaurants. I should say that simplification though, doesn't always mean smaller menu. It means less complex. Because what we've seen in the restaurant business lately, due to the pandemic, is shortages of supply and shortages in staffing. So when you think about, what do you do with a smaller labor pool? And what do you do with a potentially supply problems or in sort of unpredictability? Pearlman: You simplify the menu.

That means maybe fewer ingredients, more you

Can do with them.

So sometimes you see that on menus as a shortening, and sometimes you see it actually as a diversification. For example, one thing that I've seen emerge from the pandemic that I don't think it'll go away is meal kits. There are a lot of gourmet places. There's, in fact, a relatively new restaurant in Los Angeles called Socalo by the famous chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, very well known chefs. It's their newer restaurant in Los Angeles. And they have on their menu, right now, a take-home taco meal kit. Pearlman: And this all came out of the pandemic, and it's not going to go away. People are now going to the restaurant physically, and that item is there, still.

So the idea of cocktails to go, as long as the law allows it, the idea of selling cocktails to go, that's a new thing. So I think restaurants are figuring out more things to sell in different ways, even if it's the same stock of ingredients. Adam: You have a favorite menu, best one you saw in your research? Pearlman: The most startling menu that I saw, and the one I sort of appreciated artistically the most, didn't necessarily think it was the best sales tool, but it was a 1965, one of the earliest menus of TGI Fridays. Adam: Really? Pearlman: There's a designer who used to do their very early menus. It wasn't 1965, it was 1976, excuse me. 1976 menu of TGI Fridays designed by an artist named Woody Pirtle. And back in the '70s and early '80s, TGI Fridays had an extremely innovative menu design program. It was back when TGI Fridays was a very different restaurant.

And this designer, Woody Pirtle designed a variety of menus between the late '70s and the early '80s, and this was a 1976 menu. It all looks like a school notebook that has handwritten notes, like a student filled it in with handwriting. And it has gold stars in places the way a teacher might put a gold star on a piece of homework or something like this. It's got cartoons sketches and doodles all over it. Pearlman: And there are a variety of them in this series. There are a few different versions, and they're just gorgeous. And they're funny, and they have incredible illustrations and they're just brilliant and beautifully, beautifully rendered. And you would never guess that that was once a TGI Friday's menu.

Adam: Love it. Dr. Alison Pearlman, your book is called May We Suggest. May I suggest that my viewers and listeners buy it? Thank you, doc. Pearlman: Thank you. Adam: So we have been talking a lot about menus on the YouTubes lately, and I did a couple of videos looking at another book. This book is. Menu Design in America by the famous graphic art critic Steven Heller and the famous food critic.

John Mariani.

This is a delightful collection of historic

Menus from the united states, going back to the 19th century.

Adam: What I would like to do

Now with your indulgence is to do one more brain dump of random fun things.

I have observed reading through these old menus in this old book. So in no particular order menu brain dump number one, jelly omelets and other delights for children. 1925, El Cortez restaurant in San Diego, California, the Spanish name seems to be purely a vestigial. This is a white menu, and an early example of a children's menu in an upscale American dining establishment. Those did not get really popular until the post World War II baby boom, in the late 1940s.

Adam: The largest generation in. American history suddenly existed, and it would've been ridiculously bad business to not try to serve them. But back in the 20s, sit-down dining was almost exclusively a thing for the grownups. Most well-off people had domestic help at home, because domestic labor was much cheaper back then, for a number of reasons. And so mommy and daddy could leave the kids with the nanny, the governance, and they could go out to eat. This place, El Cortez in San Diego, was an exception. They had an extensive kid's menu featuring, among other things, jelly omelet for 35 cents. Adam: And I believe that is exactly what it sounds like — an omelet filled with a thin layer of fruit jelly.

This apparently used to be fairly popular among young and old alike. And if you Google it, you can see that some people still make jelly omelets. It's just a regular plain omelet folded over onto an oozing layer of hot strawberry jelly or the like. I should not knock it until I've tried it. Adam: So many porridges on this 1925 children's menu — milk porridge, boiled rice with milk porridge. It's easy to forget that porridge used to be one of the most common ways that people ate grains of any kind, and boiling grains in milk, instead of in water, that would've been the really deluxe way to do it. This is of course where we get the contemporary practice of eating processed breakfast cereals, like Lucky Charms or whatever, submerged in milk. I hadn't thought of that until recently, but that practice comes from the much older practice of boiling your rice or your oats or your wheat kernels or whatever in milk or water until soft, and then eating it as a porridge.

You had to do that to make cereal grains soft enough to choke down and then digest. Adam: Nowadays breakfast cereals are pre-cooked, mashed into a smooth paste, and then reconstituted into little Os or little letters or little flakes or whatever, and then they are baked, and then you pour them out of the box and you can just crunch them if you want. You do not have to get them wet in order to eat them. Unlike the grains of old that you had to get wet in order to choke them down. My kids refuse to put milk on their cereal. They just crunch it. Maybe the practice of wetting cereal with milk finally dies with Generation Alpha. Adam: Generation Alpha is what demographers are calling the kids of Millennials, such as myself.

Millennials are Generation Y, most people listening to this right now are Generation Z, which is the end of the alphabet, so we cycle back around to Alpha for my kids. Adam: Anyway, kids in the 1920s were definitely still eating porridge. And here's a funny one from that El Cortez menu, diced buttered toast in cream. Diced buttered toast in cream. I'm assuming that's exactly what it sounds like.

Seems super weird, until you consider that

It is a riff on old school porridge, grains boiled into mush.

Diced buttered toast in cream is every bit an evolution of porridge, as. Lucky Charms in milk is an evolution of porridge.

Though butter in cream, that's a lot of dairy fat. Growing boys and girls. Adam: Speaking of milk, another children's item on that menu from 1925 is poached eggs in milk. Did they poach the eggs in the milk? Or did they poach the eggs in water or something and then serve them floating in milk? Or did they poach the eggs in milk and then serve them in the poaching milk? That seems like the most logical thing to do. Beverages on this menu, orange juice, pineapple juice, prune juice, and fruit juice. What's in the fruit juice? Oranges are fruits, pineapples are fruits, prunes are dried fruits, so why wouldn't you specify which fruit is in the fruit juice? Adam: I'm going to guess that it's what we would call maybe fruit punch today. A mixture of lots of different fruit flavors. Though I believe back in the 1920s, punch still would've meant some kind of alcoholic drink, which you would not want on a kid's menu, especially not during prohibition.

Adam: But speaking of prunes, there's a dessert on this 1925 kids menu called prune whip. Prune whip, prunes of course are dried plums. Prune dishes of all kind are very common on these 19th and early 20th century American menus. Stewed prunes, were a very popular starter dish. One wonders how you could whip prunes. So I Googled it. Prune whip is basically a prune soufflé. You rehydrate the prunes, and then you puree them.

Then you whip some egg whites with sugar, up into a foam. You fold in the prune puree and bake. It looks like hot dog vomit. Adam: Did Adam just mean the hot vomit of a dog or the vomit of a hotdog? A hotdog that has been vomited? You'll never know. But probably tastes pretty good — the prune whip, not the hot dog vomit, or the hotdog vomit. Adam: Old menu brain dump number two, every menu from the 19th and early 20th centuries has a section of hot main dishes and cold main dishes, hot and cold. You don't see that very much anymore. Not many cold main dishes, unless it's a salad.

The Roycroft Inn, Aurora, New York, 1921. Hot dishes for dinner include roast leg of veal with dressing, boiled star bacon with new cabbage, tenderloin tips with mushrooms, that would sell pretty well today, Japanese crab meat au gratin, all hot dishes. Adam: And then there's a separate section of cold main dishes, as per usual, back then, roast beef commonly eaten cold today, but usually only as a filling for sandwiches, cold boiled ham, same deal today, cold salmon, I guess, today we eat sushi and lox and such cold, but it's hard to imagine just eating a cold piece of plain cooked salmon.

And then on the menu, there's the cold pickled pigs feet, no comment. Adam: Old menu bring dump number three, also on this menu from the Roycroft Inn, 1921, tea, coffee, cocoa, milk, and Postum. What is Postum? Postum was a big hit, caffeine-free alternative to coffee that was made of roasted grain pounded into a very fine powder, and then dispersed in boiling water to make an instant, hot beverage. It was made by the Post.

Cereal Company, Postum.

And it is still made by the

Post cereal company.

How have I never heard of this before? Apparently, quite popular among Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists, who of course abstain from caffeine. Adam: The Post company used to advertise this product as a safer alternative to caffeine and coffee. The spokes-character for the product was Mr. Coffee Nerves, a cartoon ghost who would appear in situations where people were ostensibly suffering the negative effects of caffeine, such as irritability. And these people would inevitably switch to Postum, and poor Mr. Coffee Nerves would be banished onto the next cartoon. Adam: Old menu brain dump number four, salted nuts.

Especially if you go back to the 19th century, it's amazing how often you see things on the menus of really, really fancy restaurants that would be regarded today as an insult to throw down on the table to a paying customer. Plain salted nuts as an appetizer or plain fresh fruit as a dessert. These things are so common today that we regard them as cheap snacks that you would buy at the grocery store and eat at home. But back then, they were pretty precious treasures, especially the fresh fruit, I imagine, especially out of season. I wonder how good a lot of that fruit actually was being shipped up from God knows where. Adam: In the 19th century US, there was usually one section of the menu called pastry, for the cakes and the pies and such. And then there was another section of the menu called dessert. And the dessert section was mostly just like apples, grapes, plums, raisins, almonds, maybe ice cream.

I wonder if people had a pastry or a dessert, or if they had a pastry and then the dessert of plain fruits and nuts. I don't know. Adam: Old menu brain dump number five, the fifth and final, two follow ups, actually. In my video from last Monday, I mentioned an 1847 Chicago hotel menu with the following words inscribed on the bottom, "each waiter is provided with wine cards and pencil.". Why would you need to mention the pencil? I wondered in that video. Well, viewer Ouchie looked it up, in a book called History of Saratoga County, New York, by Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester. "To prevent mistake arising from waiter not understanding the names of gentlemen calling for liquors at the dinner table, each waiter will be provided with cards and pencil. Gentlemen, when they want anything, will demand a card and pencil, and insert it thereon with their signature." .

Adam: So I gather you would write your name next to the wine that you wanted, and that would allow the waiters to keep everything straight. Assuming they know your name, which I don't know how they would. Do people have name tags? Otherwise, it seems like a good system, especially because it would relieve you of the pressure of having to pronounce the name of the wine that you want in front of everyone else at the table, all the other "gentlemen." . Adam: Another follow up I mentioned, in that video, an early Chinese-American restaurant menu from Los Angeles, from the Grand View Garden, circa 1922, a place with chop suey and egg foo young and pork chow mein, and all of those other not-actually-Chinese Chinese dishes that were invented for American diners by mostly the children of Chinese immigrants who came to California to labor on the railroads.

Anyway, at the top of this menu was a big note, in all caps, "Wright Act is strictly enforced here." Adam: I mentioned in the video that the Wright Act was California's state-level equivalent of the. Volstead Act, which was the federal law in the United States that banned alcohol — a period of. United States history known as Prohibition. What I didn't say in the video, because I didn't know it at the time, is that there was a particularly good reason why a restaurant like the Grand View Garden in Los Angeles would need to say, "We follow the prohibition law here.

We do not serve any alcohol, so don't ask us." Adam: It's because many of the early Chinese-American restaurants evolved from tea gardens, tea houses. That's why it's called Grand View Garden. Tea gardens or tea rooms were establishments that primarily sold tea, of course, but during Prohibition, a lot of them became places where you could get something a little stronger than tea, if you catch my meaning, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, say no more, et cetera, et cetera.

So yeah, if you were running a

Tea garden in the 1920s that actually only sold tea and food, you would need to put on your menu, "wright act is strictly enforced here, so don't ask us for any hooch." "or maybe do ask us." maybe, the lady doth protest too much.

Maybe "the Wright Act is strictly enforced here" was code for, "the Wright Act is absolutely not enforced here. Drink up, Los Angeles. Try the chow mein." Good times, 1920s, Los Angeles, as long as you were White. That much needs to be said.

Adam: Another thing that must be said is how I failed recently. We do a failure of the week here on the Adam Ragusea pod. I failed when I overcooked my egg yolks, I did a recipe that involved a baked egg. Love a baked egg, it's just so easy. You crack an egg, put it in the oven. You can see pretty clearly how much it has cooked, when the yolk is just starting to go cloudy, it's probably perfect. If you want a runny yolk, which of course I do. And even if you don't want to run a yolk, you can just reach in the oven and touch the yolk to assess how firm it is.

You just got to pull it out a little before it's done to your liking, because it's going to keep cooking between the time when you pull it out of the oven and when you actually eat it. Adam: Anyway, I was doing the bake egg, and the problem with me and how I cook is that very often I am doing it on camera, and I'm always working alone, which means I can't just cook. I have to pick up the camera, film a little, then cook, then film, then cook, then wash my hands, then film some more. And all of this slows me down, which doesn't matter when cooking a stew or something that cooks really slowly, but on things that cook really fast, like eggs, it's a big problem. Adam: So I got the eggs perfect in the oven, just starting to go cloudy. I filmed that, and then I needed to film the eggs coming out of the oven. So. I moved the camera, moved the lights, did a test shot to see if my exposure settings were correct, which they often are not.

I often overexpose very light colored things, such as eggs. And by the time I did all of that, the eggs were perfect in the oven. And when the eggs are perfect in the oven, they're going to be overcooked by the time you actually eat them. You got to pull them out right before they are perfect. Adam: Anyway, I plunged my fork into what should have been a quivering yolk. It did not quiver. It was too firm. It did ooze a little bit when cut, a thick, viscous, yellow ooze, not a true runny egg.

But my darling wife, Lauren, informs me that a baked egg yolk that oozes a thick, viscous ooze is known to the kids these days as a jammy egg. Egg yolk with a jam-like consistency, jammy egg. Let's go with that. Let's go with that. I made jammy eggs, everybody on the internet, jammy eggs. It's not a bug — it's a feature. There are no mistakes, just happy accidents, a great man with a great poofy hair once said. Adam: And I think you are great for listening to episode 11 of the Adam Ragusea pod all the way through.

We'll do Ask Adam again next week. Should I even do interviews on this show or should I just do audience Q&A? People seem to really like the Q&A. Is that just what this show should be? I don't know. You can submit your Qs for Q&A to askadamquestions@gmail, askadamquestions@gmail. I will be far more likely to actually answer your question and put it in the show, if you ask it in video form, or failing that, audio form. Introduce yourself, ask your question succinctly, ask me about food, life, whatever. Ask me questions about you, not just questions about me. Do me a favor and put a quick summary of your question in the subject line or the message body, askadamquestions@gmail.

Adam: Subscribe to the Adam Ragusea pod, wherever you get podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, wherever, it's all there. If you want to keep watching the show on YouTube, that's just fine. I have ordered a green screen so that maybe I can make my pod corner in the basement look better for YouTube. What should I project onto the green screen? Let me know. Talk to you next time...