I HAVE NEVER LIKED restaurants with large plates. Big plates usually mean tiny portions–and not just because food looks smaller on account of the vast stretches of porcelain between morsels. Not long ago, I ate at a restaurant in suburban Washington where the waiter presented my meal on an artsy earthenware plate roughly the size of a hula-hoop. I could make out several black specks in the middle of the oversized dish. Curious, I put on my glasses and, upon closer examination, determined that this was my entrée: a thimble-sized filet mignon and three peas. Restaurants in this mold bug me for another reason. Their menus are impenetrable. No one captured this better than Bill Bryson, a writer from Iowa who recently returned to America from London, where he lived and worked for 20 years. He took his wife to a fancy restaurant in Vermont for their anniversary where, he writes, “I didn’t understand a single thing the waiter described to us”:

“Tonight,” he began with enthusiasm, “we have a crepe galette of sea chortle and kelp in a rich mal de mer sauce, seasoned with disheveled herbs grown in our own herbarium. This is baked in an inverted Prussian helmet at gas mark 12 for 17 minutes and four seconds precisely, then layered with steamed wattle and woozle leaves. Very delicious, very audacious. We are also offering this evening a double rack of Rio Rocho cutlets, tenderized at your table by our own flamenco dancers, then baked in a clay dong for 27 minutes under a lattice of guava peel and sun-ripened stucco. For vegetarians, we have a medley of forest-floor sweetmeats gathered from our very own woodland dell.”