This is Moastreet Radio from PRX, and I'm your host, Christopher Kimball.

Today we're looking at restaurants from all the angles.

For architect David Rockwell, a good meal begins with great restaurant design.

And there's many, many things that go into designing a restaurant and having to be successful

that you'll never see, like, service stations being close enough that they can see the guests

or the kitchen being situated in a way the food gets there warm, the lighting, presenting the food in the right way.

Those are all elements that go to creating this unique creation

that then takes a life of its own.

The anatomy of a well-designed restaurant

that's coming up later in the show.

But first, we're starting with the menu.

Author Nathalie Cook joins me now.

Nathalie, welcome to Milk Street.

Thanks so much. I'm delighted to be here.

I've spent a fair amount of time around menus, but you have a phrase called a cryptic menu.

What is a cryptic menu? Yeah, well, there was something we discovered called an enigmatical Bill of Fair.

We've discovered thousands of them, actually, and they were menus, all, and riddles,

typically British from the 18th and early 19th century.

And when I first found one, it was a handwritten in a manuscript book, and I didn't give it a second

glance, but it was a colleague who came and said, wait a minute, look at what that item is,

and it said, you know, what Adam gave Eve instead of actually a piece of food. And then we realized

that this whole table setting was actually in riddles.

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