A menu sorted for the cook

Open the menu at some places in Doha and you can tell who it was written for.

One sorts its dishes by what happens in the kitchen. From the grill. From the oven. From the fryer. It is perfectly logical if you are standing at the pass. A guest who wants something light, or something to share, or something a child will eat, has to read every line and translate.

Another sorts by the guest's evening. To start, to share, mains, for the little ones, something sweet. Same dishes, same kitchen. The guest finds what she came for in seconds and orders without asking anyone to explain the page.

Order exists so that someone else can find things. The person doing the sorting already knows where everything is. The only reason to sort at all is the stranger.

And the stranger arrives with a shape already in mind. She expects soup before meat, sweets near the end, the bread somewhere obvious. When a menu breaks that shape it is not being bold. It is making her work, and she feels the work as irritation before she can name it.

A menu says something else as well. The order of the page is a small statement of how the place sees food. Putting the vegetables first, or giving the grilled fish a heading of its own, tells me what the cook is proud of before I have read a single price.

People cannot hold a new thing in their heads until they know where it belongs. Every place, product and person meets the same silent question from strangers: which heading do you go under?

You may wish it were not asked. It is asked anyway, so it is worth answering on purpose.