The menu was four laminated pages and I counted ninety three items on it while the server stood there being patient with me. Burgers, a Mexican section, a section of Italian dishes, a full page of seafood in a town that was nowhere near water, and at the bottom of page two, in a smaller font, six things under a heading that just said From Our Kitchen. I panicked and ordered a club sandwich. It arrived with the bread cold on one side and warm on the other, which is a thing I did not know was possible.
On the way out I passed a table where two men were eating a pork chop with fried potatoes and onions, and I could see from six feet away that it was the right order. It was on page two, in the small font.
Order the thing the menu is proud of
Almost every menu tells you what it cares about if you slow down long enough to hear it. There will be one section written differently from the rest. Longer descriptions, a sentence about how it is made, a mention of somebody’s mother or grandfather, a note that it takes twenty minutes. That is the kitchen raising its hand.
Everything else on a menu that size exists so that nobody in a group of five has to leave hungry. The section with the sentences is the actual restaurant. The other eighty items are insurance.
The longer the menu, the shorter your order
This is the rule I would keep if I had to throw out all the others. Ninety items means most of them are being held, thawed, or assembled. So on a huge menu I order the simplest thing that still requires cooking. Eggs. A burger. Soup if the room smells like soup. A grilled sandwich.
On a small menu I do the opposite and order the most ambitious thing on it, because a kitchen that only offers eleven dishes has decided it can execute all eleven, and the hardest one is the one they are betting the place on.
Ask a question you actually want answered
For years I asked what do you recommend, which is a bad question. It puts a person on the spot and the safe answer is whatever is popular, which is usually the thing that photographs well.
What works better is asking what the kitchen makes in house, or what runs out. Running out is the most honest signal a restaurant produces. If they tell me the meatloaf is gone by one every day, I come back tomorrow at noon. If nothing runs out, nothing is made in quantities small enough to be made carefully.
The other good question is what people order when they come in twice a week. That one gets you the regulars order rather than the tourist order, and the answer is often something not printed anywhere.
One more thing worth asking, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to start: whether they make the bread, the tortillas, the pie, whatever the starch of the region happens to be. The answer is either an instant yes with a little pride behind it, or a slightly apologetic no. Both answers are useful, and neither one is a trap for the person answering.
The specials board is a promise and a warning
A handwritten board that changes is worth trusting. A handwritten board that has clearly not been erased in a long time, where the chalk has gone chalky and settled into the surface, is a decoration and I read it as one.
Specials go both directions. Sometimes a special is what came in fresh that morning. Sometimes a special is what needs to be sold before it turns. The way you tell is whether the special is cheaper or more expensive than the printed menu items around it. Cheaper usually means use it up. That is not automatically bad, but it changes what you are getting.
My worst order and why I made it
Fish tacos, inland, in a town where the nearest water was a reservoir, at a place that primarily sold barbecue. I ordered them because I was tired of heavy food and I wanted something that felt light, and I let that want overrule everything I could see with my own eyes. The fish arrived in strips with a coating that had gone soft under the lid on the way to the table, and the whole thing tasted faintly of the freezer.
The mistake was not that I ordered seafood far from the coast. Plenty of inland places do fish well. The mistake was that I ordered against the room. Every single other plate going by had smoked meat on it. I knew what that building was for and I ordered like I did not.
The list I fall back on
When nothing else is clear, I order in this order. Whatever the room is already eating, if I can see it. Then soup, if it smells like it exists. Then eggs, at any hour, at a place with a griddle. Then a burger, because a bad burger is still a burger and the floor is high. Then a grilled cheese, which I have never once regretted and which tells you a surprising amount about a kitchen.
And whatever the region actually makes, if I can figure out what that is. Not the version with a clever name. The plain one, on the plain part of the menu, in the same font as everything else.