Editing Menu (section)

==Writing style==
[[Image:Delmonico menu April 1899.jpg|thumb|250px|An 1899 menu from [[Delmonico's]] restaurant in [[New York City]], which called some of its selections ''[[entremet]]s,'' and contained barely English descriptions such as "[[tutti frutti (food)|plombière]] of [[chestnut|marrons]]".]]

The main categories within a typical menu in the US are appetizers, "side orders and à la carte", entrées, desserts and beverages. Sides and à la carte may include such items as soups, salads, and dips. There may be special age-restricted sections for "[[Senior citizen|seniors]]" or for children, presenting smaller portions at lower prices. Any of these sections may be pulled out as a separate menu, such as desserts and/or beverages, or a wine list. A '''children's menu''' may also be presented as a [[placemat]] with games and puzzles, to help keep children entertained.

Menus can provide other useful information to diners. Some menus describe the chef's or proprietor's food philosophy, the chef's résumé (British: CV), or the [[mission statement]] of the restaurant. Menus often present a restaurant's policies about ID checks for alcohol, lost items, or gratuities for larger parties. In the United States, county health departments frequently require restaurants to include health warnings about raw or undercooked meat, poultry, eggs, and seafood.

===Puffery===
As a form of [[advertising]], the prose found on printed menus is famous for the degree of its [[puffery]]. Menus frequently emphasize the processes used to prepare foods, call attention to exotic ingredients, and add French or other foreign language expressions to make the dishes appear sophisticated and exotic. "Menu language, with its hyphens, quotation marks, and random outbursts of foreign words, serves less to describe food than to manage your expectations"; restaurants are often "plopping in foreign words (80 percent of them French) like "spring mushroom civet", "pain of rabbit", "orange-jaggery gastrique".<ref name="slate.com">Sara Dickerman, "[http://www.slate.com/id/2082098/ Eat Your Words: A Guide to Menu English] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071208204023/http://www.slate.com/id/2082098/ |date=2007-12-08 }}" ([[slate.com]], byline April 29, 2003, accessed Nov. 27, 2007)</ref>

Part of the function of menu prose is to impress customers with the notion that the dishes served at the restaurant require such skill, equipment, and exotic ingredients that the diners could not prepare similar foods at home.<ref name="slate.com"/> In some cases, ordinary foods are made to sound more exciting by replacing everyday terms with their French equivalents. For example, instead of stating that a pork chop has a dollop of apple sauce, a high-end restaurant menu might say "Tenderloin of pork ''avec compote de Pommes''." Although "''avec compote de Pommes''" translates directly as "with apple sauce", it sounds more exotic—and more worthy of an inflated price tag. Menus may use the culinary terms ''[[Concasse|concassé]]'' to describe coarsely chopped vegetables, ''[[coulis]]'' to describe a purée of vegetables or fruit, or ''[[au jus]]'', to describe meat served with its own natural gravy of pan drippings.