Who writes the menus in expensive restaurants? Every time I go to one of these establishments — usually as a guest, let me quickly add — I have an urge to collect the menu and study the cuisine copywriter’s art. For surely a normal copywriter in an ad agency, however good he or she is, will not be able to dress up a menu better than even the best chef can.

These thoughts came to me at the recent Swarovski dinner at the Taj Mahal Hotel’s Chambers’ Terrace. By some standards, the sit-down dinner menu was simplicity itself. For example, the first course was a choice between asparagus or salmon mousse, both served with pommery sabayon. That sounds prosaic enough, but I am willing to bet that 99 per cent of the people reading that would say, ‘Ah, pommery sabayon!’ without knowing whether it was a sauce or a pom variation on sayonara. (In case you are curious about what you put in your mouth, pom does not come from pomegranate, but an old French word, which in turn comes from the Latin poma, meaning apple. Sabayon is new French for zabaglione which is generally an Italian dessert made with whipped egg yolks, sugar and Marsala wine.)

Next came herbed sea bass & scallops ravioli or palmheart & pecan ravioli followed by rose champagne sorbet, all of which are straight forward enough. The main course for vegetarians was mélange of vegetables in a trellis crust with fennel emulsion, trellis presumably referring to the shape normally used as a frame-work to support trees or creepers. The non-vegetarians though had to twist their tongue before they could put it to more tasteful uses because what they had on their plate was lamb osso bucco on a bed of rissotto. Now osso bucco is traditionally used for an Italian dish made of shin of veal containing marrow bone, stewed in wine with vegetables, so presumably here we had lamb substituting for veal.

The desserts were plentiful. There was anjeer ke shashi tukre, the obligatory bow to Indian cuisine, but don’t ask me what ‘shashi’ means. Mariacaibo and hazelnut bombe sounded more like two Pan-American blondes than desserts, but what on earth was ‘symphony of passion’? Perhaps that’s what you had after you discovered the two bombes.

All this preoccupation with the menu almost made me forget that the evening wasn’t about eating but about an auction for a good cause, the good cause being the Swarovski Crystal Society Action Water for Nature. The SCS supports the Living Ganges project which is expected to benefit the surrounding farming communities and the Unesco Heritage site of Keoladed National Park which is rich in biodiversity. The auction, good naturedly conducted by Christie’s resulted in a fair amount of money being collected. Good cause and good eating? A wonderful combination indeed. Unless, of course, your arm was being twisted to bid. In that case, it would result in a case of acute indigestion. As for me, when the auction started that’s when my interest in the language of the menu became most acute.