Just desserts

Restaurants that have those pre-printed dessert menus with helpful pictures have always puzzled me. You know the ones – hollowed out oranges filled with orange sorbet and ‘raspberry bombes’ that look just a little rude. I mean, who in their right mind would order one of those? It’s not like the restaurant has gone to great lengths to make the dessert. They’ve rung up a food wholesaler and ordered them in large batches and been provided with the same menu that thousands of other restaurants are also handing out when the main courses are cleared away.

And the fact that the menus are laminated to make them easy to wipe clean is also intriguing. After all, there really can’t be many people who actually think ‘yum, I’ll have the Tia Maria ice cream in a Tia Maria look-alike bottle while my friend will have the hollowed out coconut filled with coconut ice cream.’ So given the lack of ordering, you wouldn’t have thought there’d be much call to wipe the menus clean.

Is this a sign of my age? Not really. I’d put it down to being a food snob were it not for the fact that the only time I tried one (the orange sorbet number) it came out so hard, not even a pick axe would have helped. After what felt like an eternity, it did eventually thaw enough to eat but the first spoonful was enough to tell me it was among the most disgusting things I had ever eaten.

The moral in the story is, like the Grange Hill Kids told us many years ago: “just say no”.