Dear Helene Darroze, Someone in your restaurant appears to have considered it a good idea to dispense with a traditional menu

and instead present all diners with a Solitaire game board, containing a number of small white balls, each emblazoned with the principal item of a dish such as Chicken or Cauliflower. Diners are then invited to choose which five or seven dishes they would like to eat by consigning some balls to the outer rim of the board whilst leaving the chosen balls in their grooves. There are a number of reasons, which I outline below, why this is fantastically irritating and pointless (as well as suggesting some other issues with your dining room which may be of interest): 1. Every single diner in my party thought that the small white balls were some sort of elaborate and trendy amuse bouche, flavoured with the item described thereon, and tried to eat them. When it emerged they were in fact made of hard marble, this was very disappointing and one of my colleagues almost lost a tooth. 2. Any menu which requires a 12 minute description from the waiter in order to enable you to understand how it works as a menu is not a pleasant introduction to an evening of fine dining. In fact, it is so complicated to understand how many courses to choose; which order to position the balls; what each dish might actually be; and what the whole fandango signified (if anything) that by the end of the waiters introduction, I suggest you might like to give guests a warm flannel to refresh themselves (and possibly a menu). 3. It is hard to imagine any person of discernment attending a Michelin-starred restaurant with an express desire to choose their dinner courses by reference to a single word. Chicken or Lamb is how my 2 year old daughter likes to describe her meals. She is doing very well on her farmyard vocabulary. Not quite so advanced when it comes to style, flavouring or accompaniments. Such a one-word approach makes sense for my daughter because her dinners are generally a BIG ONE-WORD MUSH. This is not however in the traditions of great French dining. (By way of example, I would have been delighted if the Lamb dish had been roast, rack or rare. However, had I realised it was served on a bed of undercooked chick peas I would not have chosen it quite so readily). 4. I realise, as a caveat to 2. above, that there does exist an accompanying and detailed description of the dishes available on request from the waiters. However, having to seek out an extraneous reference library in order to make sense of the bizarre menu only renders the whole faff even more self-evidently ridiculous. 5. After having chosen our dishes by reference to this odd contraption, the waiters took an age to arrive. After two hours I had been presented with a spoonful of oyster and a slice of fois gras. The wait was not the worst thing though. Every time a dish arrived hallelujah! we then had to endure the most absurd, lengthy, pretentious description of each item of the dish including its precise village origins when all we wanted to do was eat some food, rather than recap GCSE Geography. I truly understand that it is lovely to know the style and provenance of ones food, but guess where the usual place for this is? Thats right, on a menu!! Yours sincerely, Jeremy Brier