New Rules

Another year has come and gone, but certain restaurant experiences remain stuck in my craw.

As a public service, permit my disgorgement. With apologies to Bill Maher, my New Rules for 2006:

• If the tomato isn’t ripe, don’t serve it to me. I’m not even asking that it be flavorful, just that it not be green and crunchy. Bad tomatoes have become so pervasive that I increasingly find them in good restaurants.

• Inane server-speak must stop, right now. Nothing annoys me more—or sounds more amateurish—than a server who won’t stop talking. I do not need to know your name or be told that you are going to be “taking care” of me. Please do not sit down at an empty seat at my table or kneel next to me to make me feel more comfy in our newfound relationship. If recounting special offerings not listed on the menu, it is never okay to begin your sentence with “Tonight we are doing a . . . ”—unless, of course, you are also doing the cooking.

• Language and grammar abuses will no longer be tolerated. “Today’s soup du jour” or “with an au jus sauce” is just the tip of the iceberg. When you mix two languages, it gets worse (but then you probably say “Mille Lacs Lake”). But perhaps more depressing is the verbiage. In response to this crisis, some restaurants have taken to paring the menu to a pretentious few words, usually nouns. It infuriates me when I see a listing such as “Sea Bass, Pousse Pieds, Curry-Carrot Emulsion,” which means I need to have a five-minute conversation with my server, who doesn’t know what it tastes like because he doesn’t like fish. Let’s make it simple: Tell me what’s on the plate, how it’s cooked, and use conjunctions. They work.

• Consider wine service as important as any aspect of the dining experience. When a server is taking a drink order before dinner, it is not appropriate to try to sell a bottle of wine. Wine is not properly a cocktail, despite how it’s treated by the chardonnay-cabernet crowd. Those who really appreciate wine don’t know what wine they want until they know what they will be eating. Servers also need to know the wine list cold and pronounce the names properly. But wine-critic-talk is taking it too far. Don’t tell me the red has a “chocolate nose with a tobacco finish” when all I really want to know is whether it works with my lamb shank. And if you take the order, the wine better be in stock.

• Due to incompetent usage, the following items will no longer be made available to chefs in the Twin Cities: Balsamic vinegar, now an edible cliché, and Spanish smoked paprika (pimenton), an intense and overwhelming seasoning that requires more judicious handling than many local cooks are capable of. Ingredient-happy chefs with little understanding of how food works seem obsessed with pairing these ingredients with other foods even though nothing benefits from the partnership. And, please, no more pork tenderloin, which is the least flavorful and spongiest of all the pork cuts. If a restaurant has four to six entrée offerings, why must one of them be pork tenderloin?

• Do not remove my plate when I have the last bite of food in my mouth—in fact, do not remove it until all diners at the table are finished. And don’t ask, “Still workin’ on that?” to gauge whether I’ve finished.

• No more foam. It’s a gimmick. Always was, always will be.

Reach restaurant columnist Andrew Zimmern at azimmern@mspmag.com.