On the Menu: The world's favourite piece of paper

Description

From the Financial Times's long-standing restaurant critic Nicholas Lander comes this celebration of the history, design and evolution of the world's favourite piece of paper: the menu. On the Menu is a stunning collection of menus, from those at the cutting edge of contemporary culinary innovation, like Copenhagen's Noma, to those that are relics from another time: a 1970s menu from L'Escargot on which all main courses cost less than one pound; the last menu from The French House Dining Room before Fergus Henderson departed for St John; a Christmas feast of zoo animals served during the Siege of Paris in 1870; and three of the world's original restaurant menus - now hanging proudly in London's Le Gavroche. Throughout, Lander examines the principles of menu design and layout; the different rules that govern separate menus for breakfast, afternoon tea and dessert; the evolution of wine and cocktail lists; and how menus can act as records of the past. He reveals insights from interviews with Michael Anthony, Heston Blumenthal, Massimo Bottura, Rene Redzepi, Ruth Rogers and many more of the most renowned contemporary chefs of our time, who explain how they decide what to serve and what inspires them to create and design their menus. These are truly pages to drool over.

Nicholas Lander views menus from a highly unusual perspective as the only restaurant critic to have owned and run one of London's most successful restaurants. He established L'Escargot in Soho in the 1980s when he was among the first British restaurateurs to write his menus in English and to change them according to the seasons. For the past thirty years he has reviewed restaurants and menus from around the world in his role as restaurant critic for the Financial Times. His first book, The Art of the Restaurateur (2012), profiled twenty of the world's best restaurateurs and was named a Book of the Year by The Economist.