Misleading restaurant menu description

Apologies for the delayed response. I’ve been out of action for a while. Thanks to everyone who took the trouble to respond constructively whether it was to agree with my complaint, to tell me that I was being presumptuous to expect real chicken, or anything in between. To the minority (only 2 really) who chose to use this thread as an opportunity to get up on their high horses and respond to points that weren’t even made, or just throw in condescending comments while clearly not having even bothered to read the thread beyond the opening post, I hope you can at some point in the future find a way to deal with your insecurities other than playing “someone on the internet is wrong”.

I’ll try to address some of the recent questions/points raised in one go.

There is no legal definition of goujon
Someone pointed out that there isn’t a legal definition of ‘goujon’ in the way there is with Parma Ham, which is correct but I don’t think it’s really a relevant comparison. Instead I think what is more important is what a reasonable person would understand the term ‘goujon’ to mean. One poster likened it to the word ‘chop’ and I think that is a much more relevant comparison. ‘Steak’ might be another one. If a menu says ‘minute steak’ without specifying a particular cut then a reasonable person would still expect that they are going to get a thinly pounded whole piece of muscle meat (traditionally sirloin or round) and would rightly be disappointed if they were served something made from mince or, even worse, some recently defrosted mush that technically contained beef but with many other added ingredients. My mistake was in assuming that there would be a widespread understanding that ‘goujon’ has a similarly strict definition and that it refers to whole pieces of muscle meat (traditionally the tenderloin or breast). From the responses in this thread it seems that there are many people who hold to that definition but even more who don’t see a problem with ‘goujon’ being used to any describe any breaded ‘chicken flavoured’ product.

That so many people think that way was a surprise to me. It won’t make me change my mind about the definition of ‘goujon’; I still believe that used correctly it refers to whole pieces of meat; but it will make me more careful about checking what a restaurant’s interpretation is if I see it on a menu. I also believe that any restaurant manager or chef writing a menu will be aware of the proper definition of ‘goujon’ so if they choose to use that term to describe anything other than whole pieces of breaded chicken it won’t be a place I’ll go back to.

You shouldn’t expect real chicken on a kids menu/in a pub
In my own home area I could name a couple of dozen pubs that I wouldn’t take my kids to because I know they’ll be offered the cheapest/nastiest sausages or nuggets but these places also have an adult menu that is nothing special either. I could also name a half a dozen pubs where I know I can take my kids and we’ll all get decent food. These happen to be places where good quality food is their main selling point rather than just having a basic menu for people who get hungry while watching the match and having a few pints. The incident I referred to happened in another part of the country that was new to me so I tried to find something similar to the pubs with decent food that I would go to at home. On the face of it the pub we went to seemed to fit the bill. It is in a medium sized Irish town where tourism is one of the main industries and where being a ‘food and drink’ destination is one of the town’s main selling points. The pub is part of a boutique hotel which also contains a hotel restaurant and separate café and which boasts about the food awards and recommendations it has earned and its internationally renowned chef. The menu in the bar is ambitious without being too fancy. It claims to offer “honest locally sourced food” and the mid-point for three courses (without drinks) is about €25. One main course item, as an example, is “XXX Mussels served in a White Wine Onion Coriander Cream” (where XXX is actually the name of the local fishing grounds but I’m not spelling it out so as not to identify the town/hotel/pub). Chicken Goujons feature on both the adult and kids menus. Given all of the above I was expecting that this was a place that wouldn’t dream of serving anything other than breaded strips of whole meat. If the kids goujons had instead been the manufactured versions made from chopped chicken breast (as one poster linked to above in Tesco) then that wouldn’t have been too bad but would still have been a disappointment. But when it wasn’t even that but they were served round nuggets made from ‘pink slime’ I think it’s a really misleading description.

You should have spoken to the manager at the time.
We arrived on the Friday of a weekend when there was a major event in the town. It was still very early evening when we went into the pub and there was only one young guy on duty behind the bar who was also covering the floor. I got talking to him when I was ordering drinks and getting menus and understood that he had only been working there a couple of weeks and that he had been left on his own holding the fort so the other staff could get a break for an hour or two ahead of what was expected to be a long and busy night. He was clearly out of his depth and, based on the fact that it took an hour from when we walked in until we got our food, it seemed a safe bet that the kitchen was similarly lacking in manpower and experience. So there was no manager to talk to and, while I could have taken it up with the kid behind the bar, I didn’t think there was anything to be gained from it because it didn’t seem like he would be able to do anything about it. I also felt sorry for him, probably thinking back to the first time I was left in charge of a bar on my own when I was his age.

Thanks again to those who responded. It has been an education.

rubadub wrote: »

Now you did not know it was common knowledge at the time, so I would not have expected you to cop it, but am just wondering if there were other things in the same price range.

It's quite a while since we were there so I don't remember exactly what was on the Kids Menu. (They have the main menu online on their website to refresh my memory but not the kids menu.) But I'm quite certain it wasn't the Fishfinger & Chips, Sausage & Chips, Nuggets & Chips variety. I think there was a burger on there (as there is on the main menu) and also a pasta dish.