Ce prof de linguistique et d'infomatique a analysé avec son équipe des milliers de menus et découvert qu'il pouvait prédire les prix à partir du choix des mots.
Dan Jurafsky is professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. His book, ‘The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu’, is published on September 15 by WW Norton (£18.99)
(…) Menu language is equally instructive. In a study for my forthcoming book, we computationally analysed thousands of US menus and found we could predict prices just from the words on the menu. Again, the more expensive the restaurant, the fancier the words. Difficult foreign words (“tonnarelli”, “choclo”, “bastilla”, “persillade”, “oyako”) are an implicit signal of the high-educational status of the menu writer and, by extension, the customer. But we also found that expensive menus were shorter and more implicit. By contrast, the wordy menus of middle-priced restaurants were stuffed with adjectives (“fresh”, “rich”, “mild”, “crisp”, “tender”, “golden brown”), while positive but vague words such as “delicious”, “tasty” and “savoury” were used by the cheapest restaurants.
High-status restaurants want their customers to presuppose that food will be fresh, crisp and delicious. The surfeit of adjectives on middle-priced menus is thus a kind of overcompensation, a sign of status anxiety, and only the cheapest restaurants, in which the tastiness of the food might be in question, must overly protest the toothsomeness of their treats. (…)