Have you ever been seduced by a menu? I know I have. Seeing all those delicious-sounding dishes laid out in Times New Roman has, I have to admit, influenced my choice of dish on more than a few occasions.

You know the sort of thing: Prime cut of Aberdeen Angus beef, char-grilled to your specification, then drizzled with liquefied parsley butter and more than a hint of garlic and cream, accompanied by mini potato croquettes, grilled cherry tomatoes and the chef's compote of aubergine béchamel, blah, blah! Ooh yummy, I think. Yes please, I'll have some of that.

But what do I get: greasy scrag-end of superannuated bovine, in an opaque off-white slurry, with a few dollops of lumpy, breadcrumbed mash potato and an indeterminate splat of overcooked veg floating in it.

So today I am making a plea for honesty in catering. Oh sure, I know. Dream on. But we have to start somewhere. So let's have less of the flowery hyperbole and let's start calling a lump of meat just that, a lump of meat, instead of a blanking escalope, or a prime cut, or an entrecote, or a fillet, or a sliver, or a cutlet...

We have formulated a brutally honest menu, which - we feel - should be the template for all restaurant menus in future. I dunno how much business they'll do if they do decide to adopt our standards, but here goes anyway.

Starters:

Minestrone
A watery broth, made from yesterday's leftover vegetables (scraped off punters plates) boosted with a packet or two of monosodium glutamate-rich packet vegetable soup, pulped in a blender and served lukewarm.

Bouillabaisse
Fish entrails, heads and skin, boiled to a frothing mess and made almost edible by the addition of a fish-stock cube, a few lumps of left-on-plate lampuki and the occasional salvaged prawn or mussel.

Dressed crab salad
Flaked Chinese tinned crabmeat, smothered in a glutinous mess of cheap mayonnaise and tomato ketchup and surrounded by a few mangled lettuce and rocket leaves - with the brown bits cut off.

Antipasto
Recycled slivers of cheapo mortadella and salami, again surrounded by superannuated green salad.

Pasta:
Pasta Matriciano
Boiled to extinction penne, drowned in a tin of economy-priced unadulterated pulped tomato containing a couple of slivers of grisly sandwich "ham".

Lasagne
Partly defrosted sheets of pasta - (pre-prepared months ago and frozen). A miniscule amount of unseasoned fatty minced meat and everything swimming in a puddle of watery cheese sauce.

Main course:

Steak au poivre
Inedible scraps of frozen beef boiled for hours to resemble battleship grey polystyrene, then smothered in enough garlic to mummify a vampire convention and finally encrusted in pepper corns and any other filth not already used up.

Veal cordon bleu
Wafer thin slices of pork, stewed in a white sauce, with indeterminate 'bits' in.

Fenech fil-forn
Boiled cat (with the head and feet removed) garlicked into oblivion and finished (literally) in the microwave.

Catch of the day
An undefrosted, under-sized, under-flavoured, farmed sargu, microwaved to a crisp on the outside and still frozen solid in the middle, served doused in an all-disguising caper and tomato sauce.

Pudding
At this stage one is tempted to say: Why bother, if you've got any sense you'll have slung your hook by now and headed for the nearest pastizzi shop.

But for those brave enough, or with reinforced concrete digestive systems, why not try:

Homemade bread and butter pudding
Just what it says, slices of partially nibbled stale bread - some of which still contain smears of butter - chucked into a baking tin, blended with a rather elderly beaten egg or two and milk that was best before... three days ago.