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The irony of restaurants with huge menus

Sometimes when you go to a restaurant they will have absolutely huge menus, with literally hundreds and hundreds of dishes of all sorts. There is (or was, haven't checked lately), in fact, a pizzeria here that advertises itself has having over a hundred pizzas in its menu, as if that was a badge of honor and some kind of guarantee of quality.

There is, at some level, this odd misconception, probably even among many restaurant owners, that having a huge menu with hundreds of dishes is somehow a sign of the restaurant being of high quality, and something that people will take as a positive thing, something desirable. After all, you have a huge amount of dishes to choose from! You could eat there every day for a year and never have the same dish twice!

However, if I have learned anything from TV shows like the ones by Gordon Ramsay and other similar celebrity cooks, it's that it tends to actually be the exact opposite.

In other words: The larger the menu, the poorer the quality of the food tends to be.

This actually makes sense: This kind of restaurant is trying to offer everything under the Sun, but doesn't do anything particularly well. The knowledge, resources, workforce and raw ingredients are being spread among dozens and dozens, even hundreds of different dishes that they have to be prepared to do, so they don't specialize in anything in particular. This causes most if not all dishes to be done in a very cost-effective minimum-effort way, often with not much experience nor expertise in how to prepare them properly.

In contrast, the shorter the menu of a restaurant is, quite often this speaks of higher quality of the food. If the menu has 3 dishes in it, and perhaps a couple of desserts, that means that it's highly likely that the cooks are actually specialized in those particular dishes, and will make them with a high amount of knowledge, expertise, experience and skill, because they can concentrate on only a few dishes at a time.

If I ever go to a restaurant to eat, I would much prefer the menu having something like 5 dishes at most, rather than 200. It tells me that there's a very high likelihood that any of those 5 (or less) dishes will be marvelous, well worth the money.

There might be a small exception to this rule of thumb in the case of highly specialized restaurants where all the two-dozen-or-so dishes on the menu are very closely related to that specialization. For example, if it's a restaurant specializing in steaks, there might technically speaking be two dozen different steak-based dishes in the menu, but they will all be so similar to each other that it's very possible that all of them will be of high quality. Another example would be a sushi restaurant that only has different types of sushi in its menu. (Although, of course, there are all kinds of such restaurants, and they can be quite hit-and-miss in nature.)

However, the more "general" restaurant that offers more general and varied dishes, I would prefer a very short menu than an excessively large one.

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