Read The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu for Free Online Page A

Trillin. High status is signaled now not just by knowing fancy French terms, but also by being able to name all the different kinds of Italian pasta, or appreciating the most authentic ethnic cuisine, or knowing just where to find the best kind of fish sauce . Even potato chips are advertised by appealing to this desire to be authentic.
    Omnivorousness explains the decline, detailed in the previous chapter, of the use of pseudo-French as a modern marker of status on menus. And omnivorousness is perhaps one reason we are seeing the decline of the word entrée in menus and in books and magazines as well. The Google Ngram corpus , a very useful online resource that counts the frequencyof words over time in books, magazines, and newspapers, demonstrates entrée’s rise in the 1970s and 1980s and then the fall since 1996:

    If entrée is declining in use, what is it being replaced by? Some menus use “main course,” Italian restaurants often use “secondi,” and French restaurants might use “plat.” But the most frequent answer in new restaurants is, Nothing; appetizers and entrées are listed without a label at all, and diners have to figure it out, like the less-is-more implicitness we saw in menus. In the highest-status restaurants, whether the food is an appetizer or entrée portion, how crispy or fluffy it is, or even exactly what you are going to be served can literally go without saying.
    Entrée has more to tell us than Alan Davidson guessed: it concisely encapsulates an entire history of culinary status, from the structure of fabulous Renaissance meals, to the early role of French as a signal of high status, to the more recent decline of French as the sole language of culinary prestige, replaced by omnivorousness and by more tacit signals of status.
    The high status of French isn’t completely gone, however; Paul and I automatically assumed the French meaning was the “correct” one even though it’s actually the American borrowing that retained entrée’s Renaissance sense of a hearty meat course.
    In the next chapter we’ll turn to a word whose change in meaning reflects an even larger social transformation, while still retaining aspects of its meaning that are thousands of years old.

Seven
    Sex, Drugs, and Sushi Rolls
    YOU CAN ALWAYS GET a good argument going in San Francisco by asking people for their favorite taqueria. I lean toward the carnitas at La Taqueria on Mission, but our friend Calvin can be pretty eloquent on the subject of the al pastor at Taqueria Vallarta on Twenty-Fourth. San Franciscans are similarly contentious about the best dim sum, and have been politely disagreeing about tamales since the 1880s, when the city was famous for the vendors plying the streets every evening with pails of hot chicken tamales . (Some things, of course, are simply not a matter of opinion, like the best place for roast duck—it’s Cheung Hing out in the Sunset, but don’t tell anybody else, the line is already too long.)
    It’s not just San Francisco. You can’t go on the Internet these days without stumbling over someone’s lengthy review of a restaurant, wine, beer, book, movie, or brand of dental floss. We are a nation of opinion-holders. Perhaps we always have been: in De Tocqueville’s prophetic study of the American character, the 1835 Democracy in America, he noted that in the United States “public opinion is divided into a thousand minute shades of difference upon questions of very little moment.”
    Consider online restaurant reviews, those summaries of the wisdom of the crowd that have become a familiar way to discover new places to eat. Take a look at this sample from a positive restaurant review (a rating of 5 out of 5) on Yelp (modified slightly for anonymity):
I LOVE this place!!!!! Fresh, straightforward, very high quality, very traditional little neighborhood sushi place. . . . takes such great care in making each dish . . . You can tell the chef really takes pride in his work. . . .