Off Menu

On every menu there's one thing that nobody ever orders. Sometimes it's a verbiage problem, on paper the dish just doesn't sound good. It could be that the dish has an unpopular ingredient like brussels sprouts or blood pudding. Maybe the dish is just too expensive. Maybe it's not worth the cost. Or it could be a case same old same old, something every restaurant has that people are tired of eating.

There are a lot of reasons one item might not sell. Our butter lettuce salad wouldn't move last year. It was delicious, simple, light, a perfect first course--but for whatever reason it got no bites. Maybe it was too simple, too few ingredients, maybe people don't know what butter lettuce is and thought it was high in fat.

Whatever it was nobody wanted it and it got the axe. Nobody stood up for it, nobody questioned its disappearance; we welcomed a new sexier salad with more ingredients and crowd appeal.

I sometimes think that certain people are like that salad, despite all their great features they just don't appeal to the masses. Or anyone.

Okay I'm not exactly being subtle here. Let's face it, I'm a butter lettuce salad. Nobody's picking me off the menu. And I can examine and over analyze all the likely reasons but I can't figure out exactly what it is about me that is driving people away.

I'd like to think that maybe I'm an acquired taste. But maybe that's just a clever spin on the dish thought up by a server trying to sell something that nobody wants. In life, are some people just resigned to being off-menu items?