Imaginary Menus Program

Preparation

Step 1: Gather cookbooks such as Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and June Jo Lee and Pretend Soup by Molly Katzen, menus such as Chinese take-out menus, and books like The Outside Inn and How To Eat Fried Worms.

Step 2: Create three menus of your own. The first can be a restaurant menu with everything you would love to eat (perhaps an all-chocolate menu, with chocolate shrimp, chocolate salad, and chocolate chips. The second menu might be filled with food you deeply dislike, perhaps beets and cabbage and anchovies. And third could be a nonsense menu, filled with things no one could eat, or with imaginary delights such as caramel mud pies. Create one example recipe, outlining how to make one of the dishes (real or imagined).

Step 3: Reproduce examples to hand out. Check Writing Box supplies.

The Workshop

Step 1: Talk about different kinds of menus. Ask the writers what kind of menus and restaurants they know. Show them the different sections (appetizers through dessert), along with the menus you’ve made. Demonstrate how a plain piece of letter-sized paper can be folded in thirds to create a menu. Read aloud Chef Roi Choi and the Street Food Remix, Outside Inn, or a few poems in Frankenstein Bakes a Cake by Adam Rex. Pass the take-out menus around.

Using chart paper, model the creation of a menu for a made-up restaurant: What do we need to know? What is the name of the restaurant? What kind of food do we serve? What are the parts of the menu? Categories of dishes?

The facilitator can crowdsource this information.

Step 2: Give writers markers, crayons, and paper. Help with words or offer suggestions when writers seem stuck for ideas.

Step 3: Give a five-minute warning for clean up. Remind writers that the Writing Boxes will be available at the reference desk. Clean up and put away supplies.

Step 4: Ask for volunteer to share their menus, or pair up the writers to share with partners or their table.