There was a Chicago Tribune article (and you know how hard those are to access!) that cited some of their least favorite restaurant words, such as "cooked to perfection." Here are a few:

Delicious: “Don’t tell me how good it is. Just describe the dish and let the guest decide if it’s good or not.”

Homemade: “In some states, health departments will look at that and say, 'Well, whose home was that made in?' and they want see a health certificate.” He suggests menu writers use “made on premises," "our own" or "baked on premises."

Traditional: “Everyone has their own concept of what traditional is. Now you’ve got to match that.”

Wild mushrooms: “Drives me crazy because quite often they’re not wild mushrooms. It’s basically lying if you’re saying wild mushrooms and you’ve got buttons in there.” Plus, it's better to be specific: Different mushrooms have different textures, and knowing which varieties will be used adds value to a dish, he says.

Fresh: “It’s another word I tell (students) not to use unless they’re doing a fruit plate or something, because if you say one thing is fresh, it makes it sound like everything else isn’t.”

Do you have any?

Here's a couple more that I agree with, from reader comments:

deconstructed

drenched

garden fresh

home-cooked

And one of my personal unfavorites: Farm Fresh Eggs

Deconstructed? As in killed and chopped to pieces?

A couple that come to mind:

Drizzled

Artisan(al)

I remember a trip to Barcelona that was plagued by the opposite problem - menus that tended to a truly breathtaking literalness. I recall we went into quite an upmarket place for our first evening there. I ordered duck with apple expecting to get, perhaps, some slices of duck cooked in an apple sauce with a few vegetables. What I got, though, was half a roast duck and an apple, unpeeled and cut into quarters. There were no side dishes, no salad, no chips just the duck and the apple. I got quite a good deal out of it though by comparison to others. Those sampling the peas and ham got a ten inch plate of peas with bits of sliced ham scattered throughout, as for the spinach eaters... well two pounds of unaccompanied spinach would probably be more than Popeye could polish off comfortably.

In Girona my roast lamb was a piece of meat that represented a fair percentage of the animal's total body weight. It was of course served entirely untainted by contact with vegetables. Steak was steak - admittedly in a rather nice Roquefort sauce but otherwise rather lost and lonely on its oversize plate. Turbot was turbot.

The crowning glory of this obsessiveness came for those who ordered the "fruit salad" in Olot. It was an apple, an orange and a banana - whole, unpeeled, virgin fruit.

(In the interests of full disclosure this was recycled from an old, though entirely factual, blog entry.)

Wow, that is so different from here in the states.

As for deconstructed, I've never quite understood what that means. Here is a link that is helpful, but I haven't found anything real specific.

I was going to say drizzled but Arnie beat me to it. Sounds unappetizing & promises too little sauce.

I don't dine out much, but most recently (a few months ago) I found that waiters still engage in the annoying practice of reeling off the specials, at top-speed, in unintelligeable paragraphs of culinaryspeak. Keep it simple, folks!

Try Higgins in Portland, Oregon. They speak English. Ask Kalleh.

I so agree about the waiters rattling off the specials, Bethree!

Geoff, I do remember Higgins, but not sure I get the reference.

quote:

Geoff, I do remember Higgins, but not sure I get the reference.

They seem to eschew "restaurantese" terms and use plain English, as I recall. Perhaps they cater to a sufficiently sophisticated clientele that they don't need to be pretentious.

I think that's a great point. A truly excellent restaurant doesn't have to use all those adjectives.