False advertising laws only work if the public knows that it's being duped. In the case of high-class, expensive restaurants, the average consumer has no way of knowing whether or not what they are getting is what they think they paid for. For instance, if you or I were to go out and buy a low-yield nuclear weapon, we would have no choice but to swallow whatever the salesman said about special features and net devastation, because you and I don't know a darn thing about nuclear weapons and the salesman is probably better armed than we are.

Restaurant owners are not generally well-armed, but the same general principle applies: Beyond being able to identify a hamburger and recognize at what point it becomes a cheeseburger, there are very few people who don't make a living cooking or critiquing food that can tell an heirloom tomato from a beefstake tomato or can identify the difference between black truffle oil, white truffle oil, olive oil and blended salad oil. The writers of menus, therefore, are pretty much free to make promises they have no intention of keeping, without any need to fear a reprimand from the Better Business Bureau or even a complaint from a cheated customer.

Make no mistake about it: the people that write the menus want to make the food sound both exquisite and unbearably expensive. The theory is that if something sounds sufficiently expensive, you won't feel too bad about paying way too much for it. If you go out to eat, you're probably not getting what you think you're paying for. As part of my constant and tireless battle to stick it to The Man, I present the following examples from those hilarious works of fiction called 'menus' at The Shaker Table:

Lunch
While the dinner menu is significantly more relaxed in its approach to the truth, the lunch menu does feature at least one flat-out lie:
-Baked Polenta, served with a roasted, organically grown heirloom tomato, local goat cheese and wild mushroom gravy
('Polenta', first of all, is an important-sounding word for corn meal mush mixed with about eighteen different types of milkfat. The end result is like grits swimming in oil. More importantly, by the end of the season our 'organically grown heirloom tomato' is actually a regular beefstake tomato from Sysco Foodservice Corp. Our 'local' goat cheese is imported from Norway, and the 'wild' mushrooms in the gravy are regular button mushrooms bought through Sysco from indoor greenhouses.)

Dinner
Appetizers
-Sauté of Locally Harvested Forest Mushrooms
(our 'locally harvested forest mushrooms', depending on the season, either come from the basement of some fungus nut here in New Hampshire or by air mail from vast mushroom farms in Japan. A better name would be 'imported basement mushrooms'.)

-Fresh oysters of the day
(Where by 'fresh' we mean 'frozen'. 'Fresh' and 'frozen' are similar in that they both have an 'fr' at the beginning, but there the resemblance ends. But you, as the average consumer, would not be very inclined to plunk down thirteen bucks for 'thawed raw oysters of the day', would you?)

Salads
-The Shaker Table Salad: Mixed organically-grown baby greens from our garden, house-made herbed croustini, pear mayonnaise dressing
(Again, 'our garden' only lasts so long. Our greens now come from huge factory farms where they are raised with herbicides and pesticides and chemical fertilizers galore. Our 'herbed croustini' is actually a peasant bread, made by chopping up old bread scraps and adding them to the flour of a regular wheat bread. This salad would be better described as 'less than a cup of poison-sprayed lettuce, a piece of dry toast, served with salty mayonnaise that might taste a little bit like pear if you're lucky.' I feel indescribably dirty whenever I sell one of these culinary falsehoods.)

Entrees
-Grilled Portobello mushroom caps with mushroom duxelle, truffled oil and melted truffle cheese.
(This is an excellent example to illustrate a couple of very important guidelines. First: if you see a word that you don't understand, ask about it. A 'mushroom duxelle' is nothing more than a puree of onions and cheap button mushrooms with some red wine. It's mighty tasty, but not quite as impressive as it sounds when you call it a 'duxelle'. Second: be wary of the word 'truffle' and especially the word 'truffled'. Truffles themselves, when they are not made of chocolate, are insanely expensive subterranean mushrooms with a heavenly taste and texture (where by 'heavenly' I mean 'barely noticeable, except in large quantities'. They cannot be cultivated and can only be found by specially-trained pigs or dogs. The word 'truffle', however, is often used as an adjective to indicate an ingredient with a smooth texture and an insufficiently impressive name. The 'truffle cheese' in this case is normal gruyere cheese, aged a meager sixty days and available through Sysco. It has never even seen an actual truffle. The 'truffled oil' in question varies depending on what we have on hand. In my brief tenure at The Shaker Table, this oil has been served as regular vegetable oil with shaved black truffles mixed in, a mixture of eight parts olive oil and one part white truffle oil with shaved lobster mushrooms mixed in, and a whole lot of vegetable oil with about a capful of black truffle oil and some cheap button mushrooms mixed in. If you see the word 'truffle' anywhere in the description, and the price is under forty dollars, you're not going to see, taste or experience a truffle in any way.)

Do the world a favor and be a cautious consumer when you order out at fancy restaurants. And if you think there's any chance that you might not be getting exactly what you read on the menu, call the bluff. Ask to see the manager, give him an earful, and then tip your server well on your way out, because they don't get paid enough and it's not their fault that the menu writers and kitchen staff are out to screw you senseless.

Required Reading
I'm going to break from tradition for this post and assign required reading that is not available on the intarweb. You all need to go out and read something other than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, because the man is a genius and his other works are sorely under-appreciated. Suggested titles include, but may not be limited to: Hells's Angels, Generation of Swine, and any of the Gonzo Papers volumes.

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