MCLC: supersized menus

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: supersized menus
***********************************************************

Source: LA Times (3/19/14):
http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-c1-china-menus-20140319-dto,0,4608161.ht
ml

In China, restaurants supersize their menus
By Julie Makinen

Diners at high-end restaurants in China can expect elaborate tomes, some
of which weigh more than 5 pounds and list about 200 dishes.

A Peking duck dinner might inspire a twinge of guilt about indulging in
some decadent, fatty fowl. But health-conscious diners at the high-end Da
Dong restaurant chain here in the Chinese capital can at least rationalize
that they did a little weightlifting before their meal.

That's because the menus at Da Dong are heftier than a small gym dumbbell
— 5 pounds, 4 ounces, to be exact. Measuring 20 inches tall, 15 inches
wide and more than an inch thick, the 140-page menu outweighs National
Geographic's Global Atlas.

Packed with rich color photos, the volume is divided into chapters with
sumptuous red-and-white calligraphy paper. The brown binding bears the
restaurant's name, and a table of contents listing about 200 dishes runs
four pages. And diners are handed two other menus: a selection of seasonal
items (24 pages) and a wine list (a relatively svelte 19 pages).

Da Dong's massive menu may be among the most eye-popping in town, but it's
hardly alone in its heftiness or artistic ambition. Even as a trend toward
in-season and locally grown food has helped shrink the list of dishes at
many au courant establishments in the United States and Europe in recent
years, transforming their bills of fare into single-sheet affairs printed
daily on ordinary paper, high-end restaurateurs in China have been
supersizing.

Middle-8th in Beijing, specializing in dishes from Yunnan province,
employs a 128-page, 3-pound carte. At Pure Lotus, a pricey vegetarian
hideaway, customers contend with a golden-paged volume stretching 2 1/2
feet wide and weighing 4 pounds, 5 ounces; and if that isn't enough, the
nine-course $133 tasting menu is carved into an inch-thick wooden plank,
also 2 1/2 feet wide. Countless run-of-the-mill restaurants offer
customers menus as large and colorful as American high school yearbooks.

China's penchant for magnum opus-style menus is even spilling over to
Western eateries here. Mr and Mrs Bund, Paul Pairet's haute French bistro
in Shanghai, rated the top restaurant in mainland China by the Miele Guide
for several years running, has embraced the concept with gusto, presenting
a 20-page offering of about 150 items ranging in price from $6 to more
than $130, with photos of almost every dish.

"We were inspired by these Chinese menus," Pairet said. "Western menus,
they try to avoid repetition, and the price range is very narrow, but we
wanted to open it up."

Chef Dong Zhenxiang of Da Dong restaurant in Beijing said customers used
to swipe his menus as they grew more elaborate. With his mega-menus, theft
is now way down, he said.

Extensive Chinese menus are hardly new; just ask anyone who's ordered from
a Chinatown takeout joint stateside. (Harley Spiller, who holds the
Guinness World Record for the largest collection of Chinese takeout menus,
says his longest comes from Grand Sichuan in New York City.) But in
general, stateside Chinese menus are slimmer than their mainland Chinese
counterparts.

Just why Chinese menus are growing in girth is a complex question rooted
in cuisine, culture and commerce.

The Middle Kingdom has great culinary diversity, and whereas Western
cooking often relies on time-intensive techniques such as baking and
roasting, Chinese cuisine tends to utilize a relatively finite number of
ingredients, with chefs producing a multitude of dishes just by switching
from boiling to sauteing or using a slightly different sauce. In addition,
low labor costs in comparison with the West make it easier to have more
cooks in the kitchen.

Family-style ordering feeds a desire for selection, as do cooks eager to
cater to diverse parochial palates, from the spicy-loving Sichuanese to
the more delicate-dining Shanghainese. A culture of entertaining, whereby
hosts show their generosity by ordering lavishly, also pushes
restaurateurs to expand their offerings.

Other less obvious factors over the last 20 years have also helped make
menus in China increasingly elaborate. Jen Lin-Liu, author of "On the
Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome with Love and Pasta" and owner of Black
Sesame Kitchen in Beijing, said it's a reflection of China's past poverty
mixed with relatively recent economic gains.

"Chinese are able to try all kinds of imported ingredients that weren't
available just a little over a decade ago," she said.

Dong Zhenxiang, the chef behind the 600-seat Da Dong, says he started
adding photos to his menu in the early 1990s after winning designation
from the local government as a "tourist class" restaurant as the nation
shed Communist canteens and embraced capitalism.

He found that foreigners as well as Chinese alike appreciated the visual
guide.

"Chinese dishes sometimes are very abstract when it comes to their names.
Even Chinese people, if they don't know the story behind it, they'll find
it hard to understand," he said. "Take, for example, The Dragon and Tiger
Fight. It's fish and chicken. But if you don't know that, you don't know
what's in it. A picture will show you.... Even I, as a professional chef,
it's taken me years to realize why some dishes have their names."

As his menu grew more elaborate, Dong found himself in a predicament:
Customers were pinching them at a pace that made running his restaurants
difficult.

The menu at China's Da Dong restaurant chain has grown from its 1990s
version to one that weighs 5 pounds, 4 ounces, and measures 20 inches
tall, 15 inches wide and more than an inch thick. The 140-page tome lists
about 200 dishes.

"Ordinary customers and competitors would steal them; they would put them
in their bags or under their coats. Waitresses would ask if they had taken
them, and they'd just say 'no,' and we couldn't just search them," Dong
recalled. "We need about 200 menus for each restaurant, and we'd get down
to 100 and there wouldn't be enough to allow people to order."

Some restaurateurs might have dealt with the situation by switching to
simpler printouts. But Dong, whose voracious appetite extends from the
culinary arts to calligraphy, photography and poetry, was inclined to go
big.

Now, his mega-menus are made once a year at a top printing house in
Shenzhen, and theft is way down, "though we did have one person come in
with a suitcase and manage to get one that way," said Dong, who will
occasionally sell last season's menus for $200 to those who really want to
take one home.

Ed Schoenfeld, proprietor of the hip Chinese restaurant Red Farm in New
York City, says he's not intimidated by huge Chinese menus.

"When I see a big menu like Da Dong's, the first thing I think is, I'm not
going to order for half an hour!" said Schoenfeld, who over his career has
opened more than 50 restaurants in the U.S., most of them Chinese. "I want
to read the [thing] and see what the guy is doing and pick out what's
interesting."

Pairet tries to make it easier at Mr & Mrs Bund. His menu includes little
red and green color-coded ampersands indicating which dishes are "most
popular" and which are "most popular after the most popular."

The success of Mr & Mrs Bund has inspired other Western-style restaurants
in Shanghai to embrace the concept of family-style ordering, Pairet said,
but he's not expecting the big-menu trend to catch on overseas.

"The large menu, I haven't seen it really as a trend elsewhere. But what
would be really interesting for me would be to see the reverse, a Chinese
restaurant going on a French model or Western model. Some Chinese
restaurant doing a degustation menu or a small menu like a bistro that
would change every day. Things like this would be very interesting."

Nicole Liu in The Times' Beijing bureau contributed to this report.