Dining between the lines

THERE’S more to a menu than meets the eye. A carefully designed one, such as this dinner menu from Providence, chef Michael Cimarusti’s high-end seafood palace on Melrose Avenue, conveys as much about food fashion, the L.A. dining scene and even the diners themselves

as it does about the food.

-- Laurie Winer

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CIRCLE GAME: To suggest an aesthetic direction for Providence, which opened last June, designers Satoko Furuta and Stacey McCombs produced a 64-page book of photos, drawings and word play, all reflecting images of the sea. This they boiled down into the restaurant’s logo. McCombs saw the irregular circle as fishing line, curled from being on a reel. Plus, she says, “a circle is a happy food shape -- it reminds me of plates and swirls of sauce.”

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LOCATION, LOCATION? Conventional design wisdom holds that the first and last dishes in each category on a menu sell best, especially the item on the upper right side of an open two-page menu. Apparently, the human eye goes there first. “We didn’t want to put the caviar first because it’s so expensive,” says manager (and Cimarusti’s wife) Crisi Echiverri. It turns out, however, that on this menu anyway, location isn’t everything: The items that sell best are those on which servers lavish the most verbal descriptions.

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SPARE: Ten years ago, it was chic for restaurants to provide adjective-laden descriptions of dishes, listing each ingredient and cooking technique. These days, it’s hip to list just a few key ingredients, separated by commas. Stonehill Tavern, chef Michael Mina’s new restaurant at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, employs this style, as do Sona, Table 8 and Meson G. It’s as if to say, “Here are a few perfect ingredients, and now our brilliant chef will work his magic on them.”

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NO OBJECT: One of the pearls of wisdom of “menu engineering,” a marketing discipline that came of age in the mid-’90s, was the idea that when prices are lined up flush right, diners pay more attention to them. Providence, Ortolan and Lucques try to take the focus off the prices by floating or centering them, while Sona and Stonehill Tavern line them up on the right.

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OH LA LA: Se habla French aqui. How chic is that?

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DISCRETION: Dropping farmers’ names on menus used to be fashionable, but as far as Providence is concerned, that’s over. Almost. Here, Cimarusti mentions the provenance of the peas, “mainly because people did not believe we would have fresh peas in the winter, and we do.” By contrast, though the type of potato is noted, its provenance isn’t. Wild Baltic salmon warrants a place name and adjective because “wild salmon are becoming a thing of the past,” as Cimarusti explains. Striped bass does, too.