ISO Standard Menu Items

You enter a restaurant, sit down and consult the menu. Great! Mixed grill... your favourite. Having measured the price against the bulge in your wallet and found it an appropriate match, you order and await delicious meatstuffs. Ten minutes or so later your order arrives... thin-sliced cheap beef, a chicken wing, a chicken frankfurter, a slice of onion and a fried egg.

Solution:

Next time you go to the resturant, you will check carefully for ISO standard references next to the menu items. A fully compliant ISO certified restaurant would assure you of (for example) a mixed grill containing at least one 12oz+ steak, at least 60cm of pork ribs, a quarter lb or more of black pudding, three good-sized cumberland or linconshire sausages, fresh mushrooms, onion, chips, and beans. You would then have the confidence to order and the assurance of a good meal.

The ISO standard for menu items will need to define all the important meals, such as 'steak', 'roast', 'mixed grill', 'fish and chips', 'full english breakfast', 'continental breakfast' etc.

Key definitions from the ISO standard could even be adopted by governments as legally binding... i.e. it could become illegal not to serve cold meats and fresh pastries in a continental breakfast.

To help standards to be maintained over a longer period of time, any ISO certified resturant failing to deliver all items of the specification for a given meal will have to choose either to give the meal for free or cancel their certification.

I realise that this might tread on the heels of all the Michelin / star awarding etc. bodies but to be honest, they're doing a really bad job. The more stars a restaurant has, the less meat and carbs you get and the more bits of twisted leaf and tiny shreds of fish, and that surely isn't right!