I do my best to enjoy food. I’m not the healthiest person but I do know what I like. One of the worst things about food is menus where they don’t state exactly what they’re serving. A friend wouldn’t intentionally put unexpected things on your plate but a business who you can potentially refuse to pay would.

Imagine, you’ve just ordered a Chinese where you can’t wait for the powerfully flavoured sauce paired with some noodles and meat. When it arrives you get a box of vegetables in sauce which you know are there to provide flavour, you dig out the meat and start shovelling noodles onto your plate then realise there’s more bean sprouts than noodles. Suddenly the really satisfying meal you were expecting is nothing like what you expected. If they’d have put noodles and bean sprouts on the menu you could avoid the disappointment, the omission on the menu is a mistake that so many places make.

I remember having one of the worst burgers ever when I was on holiday once. I can’t remember exactly where we were but it was somewhere in Spain or one of the nearby islands. A hungry family stops at a cafe thing, they get an outside table and a friendly member of staff sorts them out for drinks and takes their orders of cheeseburgers which were listed on the menu, they were listed as having salad and probably fries with them. It arrived at the table in the sun looking like a great holiday meal. One bite in and everybody’s faces sank. There was a house sauce on the burgers that tasted so bad that most of the family didn’t eat. I remember that the only way I got through it was by soaking it in so much ketchup that I couldn’t taste anything else. If the sauce was listed on the menu we could have asked for it to not be added. We didn’t go back to that cafe again.

So, I’m offering advice to any takeaway or cafe owners out there. If you’re putting anything extra into a meal that could dramatically effect taste or texture then include it on the menu because at least then people could tell you to leave it out. Doing this will mean you get a higher chance of repeat customers because no one will expect the unexpected from you.