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Menus and Foodways Menus-- the bills of fare at restaurants-- are revelatory of the foodways of those who patronize them, but they are also chock-full of the evidence of other forms of social and cultural cohesion and identity. People go to restaurants with ideas in mind: pleasure, social connection, adventure, and reinforcement of their expectations. Restaurant menus range from the austere to the extravagant, and the nature of that austerity or extravagance is part of the cultural community from which the restaurant comes and from which it draws its clientele.
Here, for example, is the menu from the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, home of the 72 oz. steak, where if you can eat it in an hour, it's free! (no one from FASI or ASSI has tried, though Jarl (Norway, 2004) is disappointed he didn't. The food there is surprisingly good, considering that one is in what is transparently a Tourist Trap, complete with three-piece table-to-table Texas Swing band, wisecracking waitresses, and the decorative exterior, where a false-front Texas frontier town (right out of TV westerns, that is) hides the motel and the vaudeville hall. That they have a web page should indicate just how much they depend upon a Disney-ized model of packaging predicted expectations in a satisfying way. |
