Hello, I’ll be your waiter this evening.
Before we get started, have you been here before? Do you know how it works here?
OK, let me try and explain this. Everything we serve here is on the paper you hold in your hands, which we call the menu. Use this as your guide to order what you will be eating and drinking, what will comprise a meal, not to be confused with my name, Emile.
So you’ll have the food or “meal” you’re eating here tonight and then you’ll have me, E-mile, your waiter, helping you with everything, and whom of course you will not be eating, assuming none of you are from Papua New Guinea? Wonderful, then I will presumably be keeping my penis in my pants tonight and not in your soup.
Is everyone clear on the difference between me, your waiter, and the dishes you’ll be eating tonight? That one is a person and the other is food? OK, great, I like this table, y’all are quick studies. Pardon my southern twang there. Though I went to school in the northeast I grew up in the south and sometimes my southern dialect escapes. I simply meant “you all.”
So. You have before you our menu for this evening. If you look at the top of the page, you will find our selection of appetizers. These are small dishes you would eat before the larger dish, the entrée. For now, don’t worry about the entrees; we’ll get to those in a bit.
Under the appetizers you’ll find salads, which are a collage of lettuce and vegetables, as well as small plates, and soups. The small plates are smaller versions of a larger meal, and by smaller I mean less food. And also the plate is physically smaller than an entrée plate, which would be a larger plate for a larger meal.
People generally enjoy one appetizer per person or you can get a few appetizers and share them together. That would be a choice you’d make on your own once I leave you temporarily to return to my station near the kitchen, which is where we wait and give you enough time to decide what you would like for your meal tonight. This is a process in the restaurant industry typically called waiting on a table.
How many dishes you get will depend on how hungry you are, which of course will depend on the particular cocktail of ghrelin and neuropeptide hormones in your body at this time. In case you’re not familiar with ghrelin it is the peptide released by endocrine cells within the stomach’s lining and neuropeptide is a potent stimulator of feeding behavior.
If you flip the menu over you’ll find on the reverse side our selection of drinks, which are various forms of liquid.
Oh, and before I forget, you will see numbers to the right of everything on the menu. This is the price for that item and these are in U.S. dollars. So if you were to see the number “nine” for instance, that would indicate that said item will cost nine single U.S. dollars.
At the end of the meal we will tally up the prices for everything you ordered and that will be the full amount owed, which you can pay in cash or with a credit card, which is part of our system of capitalism, originating back in the 14th century when conflicts arose between serfs and lords. There weren’t any restaurants then though, only farming, which is still the way fruits and vegetables are still grown, meaning from the ground, starting with seeds that become plants, which are then harvested, picked, packed, and sold to stores.
If you flip your menu back over and move down to the entrees section I can explain how this works. You will want to choose one entrée as your main course. Each entrée is composed of different meats and ingredients. The words you see under each entrée name are the description of the entrée.
The words are made up of letters, taken from the alphabet, first recorded in 1011 by a monk named Byrhtferth, who listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet first, which included ampersand as well as the Tironian note ond, which you will not find on our menu.
Our English language was then written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet in the 5th century. If anyone requires a menu written in pre-12th century English please let me know and I will grab one from the back.
Please read the entree descriptions to gain insight into what it will taste like. Unfortunately you will have to imagine what each meal tastes like based on the description and past experiences you have had with each ingredient. If you have had garlic in your lifetime then you can safely assume the garlic we are using will taste the same.
When you have made your choices, which are governed by culture, ethnicity, environment, and heritage you would then use your voice to communicate the words on the menu that indicate to me what food you want to eat. I will then use a pen to write those words down and bring it to the chefs in the kitchen.