If you're of a certain age — I'll leave the exact number of years up to you — you'll remember when restaurant menus were as long as novellas, with enough adjectives to give Emily Brontë a run for her money. Intricate details of cooking technique and provenance were listed for each dish, turning the act of reading a menu into a laborious process better suited to a comfy armchair and reading lamp than a noisy restaurant and dim lighting. These days, though, all unnecessary words — and some necessary ones, too — have been stricken from the page, leaving entrees described by little more than a series of ingredients, as in "pork, polenta, peach,... More >>>