Restaurant language lessons from Andrew Coppolino

Like any industry, restaurants have a specialized vocabulary or jargon.

While waitstaff may tell you that they have run out of that night's truffled mac and cheese special, the kitchen refers to not having anymore as "86-ed." 

Here's a select list of words, that you might find on a restaurant menu, what they mean and a bit of their history. 

Meat & cheese

At the Charcoal Steak House, enjoy a Wagyu steak (an uber-premium Japanese breed of cattle) with a demi-glace, which is a reduced sauce thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Stock (like a broth) that is on its way to being reduced to glace de viande ("meat ice or meat glass") is a demi-glace when it's half-way there. (The wagyu and demi, by the way, is $149 for 14 ounces.) 

You will find salumi on charcuterie boards at Proof in Waterloo. It has echoes of salami and so it should: it's the huge range of Italian cured (usually pork) meats. Sure, call them cold cuts. 

La Cucina Kitchener serves burrata: mozzarella cheese formed into a "pouch" and filled with even more cheese (traditionally stracciatella di bufala) and cream. Wildcraft wraps theirs in prosciutto. It's a heavenly appetizer. 

Mayo-li 

Two terms that have (wrongly) become conflated and which appear just about everywhere are mayonnaise and aioli. The former is made by whipping oil into an egg yolk; the latter is a Provençal condiment made by whipping together garlic paste and lots of olive oil.

Note: taking a teaspoon of chopped garlic and stirring it into Hellmans does not an aioli make. 

Regardless, neither of the above could be done without an emulsion, a term sometimes used as a fancy-pants word for sauce. An emulsion is the result of beating together two liquids that don't want to go together. Put some oil and vinegar in a jar and they want to stay separate; shake vigorously and add some seasoning and you have a vinaigrette. 

Cooking

On many menus, confit will appear: it's both an ancient meat preservation technique and a dish that is perhaps most often seen as duck confit.

Time was, you submerged a duck leg in fat and cooked it in the oven. It was stored in the fridge buried in the fat and then cooked in a hot pan so it's crispy and tender. Recently, chefs are cooking vegetable confit: submerged in good olive oil, veg like parsnips, onions, green beans and carrots are cooked low and slow in the oven. 

Crudo is Italian for "raw:" compare ceviche, which in Latin American cooking is raw fish marinated (therefore "cooked") in citrus; Taco Farm serves ceviche, while crudo makes its way onto the menu at Public periodically. Alternatively, something that is well cooked and nicely crispy is "en croute," meaning baked in pastry.

Another popular low and slow cooking method is sous-vide (French for "under vacuum"). It, too, is a technique that's 200 years old. Today, with inexpensive equipment and phone-app technology, it has become more popular. 

The process vacuum seals, say, a pork chop in a bag with some oil and herbs and places it in an immersion circulator (like a water bath) which cooks the meat for a long time at a constant low temperature so it never dries out or becomes overdone. Kitchener's Gilt Restaurant has 24-hour sous-vide beef ribs on their menu. 

Vegetables can be cooked sous-vide, too: heat your water to 88 C and vac seal some carrots in olive oil and cook. You may also see a"64-degree" poached egg on restaurant menus.   

Heritage heirlooms 

We can have lots of local food but not all of it is heirloom or heritage. The interest in heritage food counters our mainstream industrial food production. 

Historic varieties of fruit and vegetables that may have been recovered from near-extinction are increasingly popular.  

Heritage fruit are not hybrids, and an heirloom tomato is a knobbily-shaped affair compared to a perfectly round tomato hybridized and created for display in the produce section.  

For meat, there are many heritage pork varieties that were once on endangered species lists, the Red Wattle being raised in Baden, Ont., for instance.  

These varieties are overseen by Rare Breeds Canada and have to satisfy certain technical requirements: a heritage breed pig must produce the breed type when mated together and it must have access to open pasture and diets and be free from routine prophylactic antibiotics and administered synthetic or natural growth promoters.    

Spice words

Of course, many restaurants featuring foods from around the world offer lots of unfamiliar terms. As just one set of examples, many have to do with spices; what's interesting is the number of blends you will encounter. 

You will likely find togarashi on a Japanese table: it's a blend of ingredients like chilis, seaweed, sesame, orange peel and ginger. It's part of Bao Waterloo's chicken katsu dish. 

Similarly, found at virtually all Indian restaurants, the foundational garam masala isn't one spice but several: it blends cumin, coriander, mace and cardamom. 

Harissa is a north African chili paste. Also north African are ras el hanout and chermoula: they all add flavours in the cumin, coriander and cardamom range. 

Za'atar is a Middle Eastern spice blend often with sumac, while berbere is a chili pepper-based spice blend with cardamom and fenugreek that you can find in dishes at Muya and East African Café, both in Kitchener. 

Cuisines

You might enjoy the occasional omakase menu: it means "entrusting" in Japanese; or, the "chefs' choice" in which they serve you what they want to serve and you don't know what's coming. It's not for timid eaters. 

It's interesting how many cuisines share common ingredients and how many of these blends and other flavours are being used by cooks in North American-style restaurants. 

As a last example, I want to go back to Wildcraft where there's a juicy nugget of "secret" restaurant lingo that's based in pop culture: it's the seven-ounce "Thurston Howell" tenderloin with truffles ($49) that you'll only understand if you watched Gilligan's Island.