• Gobbledygook
• Language at -ese: Academese, Legalese, and Other Species of Gobbledygook

• Lingo
• Register
• Slang
• Verbosity
• Vernacular

Examples and Observations:

• "Growing a beard:restaurantese for food that has not been picked up from the serving line and is growing cold."
  (Paul Dickson, Slang: The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms. Walker Publishing, 2006)
• "Crunchy Frog" (Restaurantese in Monty Python)
  "We use only the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple-smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose."
  (Terry Jones in episode six of Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1969)
• Home Cooking
  "'You’re not getting it!' she said sharply, her face flushed with exasperation. 'We have been caught in our own home cooking.'
  
  "'Home cooking'?
  
  "She sighed. 'That’s restaurantese for throwing something back in the pot when it has fallen on the floor. Deceit. It means deceit."
  (Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs. Bond Street Books, 2009)
• Alternatives to the Present Tense
  "In formal settings, the past tense can be used for the present tense. At the end of the main course, a tuxedoed waiter in a fancy restaurant might ask a diner, 'Did you want some more coffee, ma'am?' The wrong answer is, 'I did, but now it's too late.' In restaurantese and, more generally, in very formal registers, the past tense substitutes for the present tense.
  
  "In slightly less formal registers, the conditional is used instead of the present: 'Would you like some coffee?' Again, the wrong answer is, 'If what? Would I like it if what?'"
  (Joel M. Hoffman, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning. St. Martin's Press, 2010)

• The Countable Use of Mass Nouns
  "The subclassification of common nouns into mass and countable . . . is clear, but many nouns have both uses . . .. In some cases, one use is clearly secondary and limited in its use, e.g. the countable use of basically mass nouns in 'restaurantese,' e.g. an orange juice, two soups; here it seems more natural to speak of '(ad hoc)conversion.'"
  (N. E. Collinge, ed., An Encyclopaedia of Language. Routledge, 1990)
• Frenchifying Menus
  "Culinary euphemism is often motivated by the need to make something that is intrinsically unappetizing or mundane sound better by giving it a nice name. A scarcity of meat was perhaps the motivation for the description Welsh rabbit and also Welsh rarebit, a genteel variant of the name of this cheese dish that appeared in the 18th century. . . .
  
  "Cookbooks, restaurants, and cafes sometimes offer fine examples of this kind of inflated language. Much of it is French-inspired vocabulary to connote culinary refinement. How much classier a meal becomes when a leek tart is changed to flamiche aux poireaux, oxtail to queue de boeuf and tossed salad to salade composée. Soup versus potage de whatever, stew versus casserole, slice versus tranche, aged versus affiné, swimming versus nageant, in aspic versus en gelée, reheated versus rechauffé--all distinguish the mundane from the elegant. . . .
  
  "As the Zwickys illustrate in their glorious account of American restaurant menus ["America's National Dish," 1981], the language of 'restaurantese' can go to extraordinary lengths in the quantities of French dressing applied. Frenchifying a menu might simply involve a dash of token phrases like du jour and au added onto strings of otherwise English words. Turtle soup au Sherry and Split Filet of Tenderloin au Burgundy. Other linguistic condiments include au gratin and en casserole: Ravioli parmagiana, en casserole; Au Gratin Potatoes en Casserole."
  (Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• The Locavore Trend
  "What are the indicators of an expensive, high-class restaurant? Perhaps you'll recognize the marketing techniques in the descriptions of these three dishes from pricey places:

  HERB ROASTED ELYSIAN FIELDS FARMS LAMB
  Eggplant Porridge, Cherry Peppers,
  Greenmarket Cucumbers and Pine Nut Jus
  
  GRASS FED ANGUS BEEF CARPACCIO
  Pan Roasted King Trumpet Mushrooms
  Dirty Girl Farm Romano Bean Tempura
  Persillade, Extra Virgin Olive Oil
  
  BISON BURGER
  8 oz. blue star farms, grass fed & pasture raised,
  melted gorgonzola, grilled vegetables

  You probably noticed the extraordinary attention the menu writers paid to the origins of the food, mentioning the names of farms ('Elysian Fields,' 'Dirty Girl,' 'blue star'), giving us images of the ranch ('grass fed,' 'pasture raised'), and alluding to the farmer's market ('Greenmarket Cucumbers'). . . .
  
  "Fancy restaurants, not surprisingly, also use fancy words. In menus from 50 to 100 years ago this often meant long French words, but now lots of other foreign words are used on fancy menus. In our sample of expensive modern menus this means words like tonnarelli, choclo, bastilla, kataifi, persillade, and oyako (from Italian, Peruvian Spanish, Arabic, Greek, French, and Japanese, respectively)."
  (Dan Jurafsky, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. W.W. Norton, 2014)
• Down-Market Restaurantese
  "[P]rovenance-oriented menu language is spreading outward from the finer restaurants to the Subways and Applebee’s of the world. The first franchise to take provenance seriously was Chipotle, says the food developer Barb Stuckey. ('They’ve always menued Niman Ranch pork.') Now some McDonald’s burgers are served not on 'buns' but on 'artisan rolls,' and TGI Fridays boasts of 'vine-ripened tomatoes.'”
  (Jen Doll, "Menu Speak." The Atlantic, September 2014)
   
• George Will on "Verbal Litter"
  "In a just society it would be a flogging offense to speak of 'steerburgers,' clams 'fried to order' (which probably means they don’t fry clams for you unless you order fried clams), a 'natural cut' (what is an 'unnatural' cut?) of sirloin, 'oven baked' meat loaf, chicken pot pie with 'flaky crust,' 'golden croquettes,' 'grilled-in-butter Frankforts [sic],' 'liver with smothered onions' (smothered by onions?), and a 'hearty' Reuben sandwich.
  
  "America is marred by scores of Dew Drop Inns serving 'crispy green' salads, 'garden fresh' vegetables, 'succulent' lamb, 'savory' pork, 'sizzling' steaks, and 'creamy' or 'tangy' coleslaw. I’ve nothing against Homeric adjectives ('wine-dark sea,' 'wing-footed Achilles') but isn’t coleslaw just coleslaw? Americans hear the incessant roar of commerce without listening to it, and read the written roar without really noticing it. Who would notice if a menu proclaimed 'creamy' steaks and 'sizzling' coleslaw? Such verbal litter is to language as Muzak is to music. As advertising blather becomes the nation’s normal idiom, language becomes printed noise."
  (George Will, "Language Becomes Printed Noise." Lakeland Ledger, May 12, 1977)
• On the Menu at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square
  "Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? . . .
  
  "Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as 'Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,' did your mind touch the void for a minute?"
  (Pete Wells, "As Not Seen on TV." The New York Times, November 13, 2012)
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