How a Menu Gets Written After the Boxes Arrive

Nobody believes me, but I don't write the menu until the boxes are open.

On Monday the farms send a list of what they think they'll have. It's a hopeful list. By Wednesday morning the crates are on the pass and half of that list has turned into something else: the beans came in small, the pears are three days early, one field flooded and there isn't a leek in the county. The menu you eat on Saturday is the one I wrote after all that, in pencil, on the back of a delivery slip.

Pencil first

Pencil, because paper is allowed to be wrong. A course lives on the slip for a day before it earns a typed line. I'll cross out a dish three times and bring it back on the fourth, usually after Dale, our sous chef, tastes it and says nothing at all. That's his way of saying yes.

Every menu starts with one ingredient that has to be the star, and I'm bossy about it. If the celeriac is extraordinary, the celeriac gets a whole course and nothing is allowed to compete. If three things are merely good, I pick one, and the other two go into the staff meal.

The shape of five courses

Five is a small number, so every slot has a job. The first wakes you up: something cold, sharp, a little sweet. The second is the comfort course, where the room settles and people start talking over each other. The third carries the most technique. The fourth is the heavy one. The fifth is dessert, and I'd like it to taste like the same afternoon as the first course, only later.

I sketch that skeleton before I look at a single crate. Then the crates argue with it. Usually the crates win.

What gets cut

The painful part is the edit. Last spring I loved a dish of pickled green plums so much that I kept forcing it onto the menu where it didn't belong. Too sour for the fourth course, too clever for the first. Priya, who runs the front of house, finally said, "You're not cooking for us, you're cooking for the plums." She was right. The plums went into jars. They'll come back in winter, when nothing else is green.

Cutting is also where the menu gets its calm. A tasting menu that includes everything good the kitchen can do is exhausting to eat. One that leaves things out feels generous, strangely enough, because you're never asked to hold more than you can taste.

Writing it down

Only when the five are settled do I type anything. The wording matters more than people think. Over-describe a dish and the table has nothing left to discover. Four ingredients on the line, maybe five, and never a sentence about how lovingly anything was handled.

The menu turns over about every six weeks, and the next one is already being argued about. The autumn one is written up in The Autumn Menu: Five Courses, Five Glasses.

If you'd rather eat the thing than read about it, come and sit at the long table. The pencil slip will be somewhere close by, probably under a tray of shallots.