Ordering
While men want a concise menu, something to the point and well signposted like a PowerPoint presentation (bacon and eggs; sausage and mash; liver and bacon; chicken in a basket; hog in a bun; that sort of thing), women prefer to slow-dance through the dishes in a manner similar to the way in which we buy shoes, with leeway for thinking, 'Oh, shall I? Shall I? Ooh maybe', et cetera. This window-shopping could take some time. Almost as long as a nice cold bottle of Chablis.
However, restaurateurs should beware: if it's all too fussy - for instance, if the first item reads, 'Prosciutto Pio Tosini, 18 months, Parma, Italy, Home-made Hungarian Elk Salumi, Crostini, pickled Fiddlehead Ferns and Cured Olives blah blah blah' - we'll get Menu Vertigo, and fall headlong towards the bottom of the page, where we will settle for 'just a rocket salad'. I have a friend whose middle name is 'just a rocket salad'. She eats nothing else - in public at least; I strongly suspect that once she has paid for the £11.50 salad, she pops into the newsagent on her way home to pick up a family bag of Revels.
Restaurateurs should also note that Making Menus for Girls involves a certain amount of sophistry. Thus, if a pudding involves 'churros' or 'beignets', we will order it. If you call them 'doughnuts', we won't.
Bear in mind, too, that we calibrate our order quite finely with what the other women have chosen. If Philippa is 'only having a tricolore', we'll have the same, but without the buffala. Look upon it as a sort of gastronomic gazumping. Working logically, if a table of six women go out for lunch, the last one to order will go home hungry, possibly resorting to stealing the Mint Imperials from the bowl at the door to sustain her till tea.
Things we like to see on menus
Salads with an interesting component. Wild leaves, for instance, served with aged parmesan made in the artisan way by the Benedictine monks of the Po Valley; salt-and-chilli squid on a bed of wild rocket; salt-and-chilli squid out of bed; tempura of any description (it's a way of eating deep-fried without saying so); sashimi (of anything; if it's thin, it's in); scallops (dive-caught, please); a delicate salad of endive, walnuts and blue cheese; steak tartare; fish cakes; anything accompanied by hollandaise... These are all girl dishes. Man dishes, incidentally, include sausage and mash, osso bucco, devilled kidneys, lamb shanks (too vast! too knuckley!). Similarly, a rack of ribs comes with the almost neanderthal demand that you get stuck right in. No woman wants to leave the table with barbecue sauce under her French manicure.
Broadly speaking, while meat is unreconstructedly blokeish, fish is rather more feminine - possibly because there is less gore involved in its preparation. We're fonder of the garden too, and find ordering salads a liberation not a duty. This harks back to our earliest days when men hunted and women gathered. Deep down, we still quite like a nice bowl of seeds and some wild cherries; conversely, a haunch of venison, a hock of ham, a brace of pheasant are all very male, even if they hail from the chiller cabinet of Waitrose rather than the wilds of Yorkshire.
As with shoes, women tend towards small, pretty and expensive things. It's why we have a great fondness for canapés. No mess, no fuss, just huge quantities of food delivered in small, elegant, inconspicuous little packages. Crucially, no one can begin to calculate quite how many you have demolished. I have left drinks parties having consumed my own body weight in mini vol au vents, and no one was any the wiser. In fact, and I'm really coming clean here, I have been known to station myself at the swing doors to the kitchen at cocktail parties, the better to gorge on the canapé tray as it first emerges. There are few more disappointing sights in this life than an empty canapé platter sailing past on the palm of a good-looking waiter. Apart, that is, from the tray with one solitary morsel left on it; no one will eat that remaining canapé (least of all a woman), because doing so is blatantly, publicly plain greedy.
Things we don't like to see on menus
Basically, we don't want stuff that squirts or dribbles, or anything that requires us to tuck a napkin into our bra. I once ordered satay sticks in a deeply swish restaurant and struggled to tease the meat from its skewer, all the while maintaining the incisive repartee demanded by my rather grand company. After some moments of applying force with a fork, a missile of hot chicken pinged across the room and landed in the lap of a carefully coiffed woman two tables away. This she found neither funny nor clever (though in retrospect, it was both).
Similarly, women tend to groan if their order arrives looking as though it has been designed by Antoni Gaudí. Anything that is finely balanced on a tableau of crostini or poised on a roundel of rough-puff, anything that is taller than your tumbler of San Pellegrino, anything trapped in a spun-sugar cage, anything that has more storeys than your local NCP, anything that looks too real (I'm talking poussin, whole lobster and fish-with-a-face here) - all of these are unappealing to your average female. While men will dig in - taking a boisterous stab at whatever turns up, reducing it swiftly to its constituent parts by sheer force of will - girls are more wary. Call me soft, but wrecking all that effort with a fork seems somehow churlish.
On the whole, therefore, we prefer flat things. Plate of carpaccio, good. Tower of spring vegetables, bad. Crème brûlée, good. Millefeuille of crème Anglaise with a red-berry coulis and tulip of sorbets, very, very bad.
We don't order pasta at restaurants. One, because a plate of spaghetti vongole looks huge (you might as well have a neon sign above your head saying, 'Look at me! I'm eating!'). Two, because pasta is almost pure carbohydrate, which we women all know is a gastronomic sin of the first order. Three, because it's what we eat at home, alone, from enormous great tureens in front of Dragons' Den while our toenails are drying.
We also say no to bread. But yes to breadsticks. No to butter, but yes to darling pools of olive oil in a charming central dipping dish. We don't, however, like plates decorated with a drizzle of anything, but specifically not balsamic vinegar, which is the devil's own job to get out of white cuffs.
More things not to serve to women: cassoulet (the combination of beans, pork rind, duck fat and Toulouse sausage has 'Man' written all over it; cassoulet is both hearty and peasant - a lethal combination on the scales). Ditto saveloys, meat pies, Cornish pasties, Scotch eggs, mushy peas, burgers, in fact, football food of any description. Also mixed grills, black pudding, anchovies on toast, gulls' eggs, chops, game. Anything with shot in it or eyes still in. Any recipe that demands you braise pigs' feet. I remember my grandfather had two dishes in his repertoire: brawn and dressed crab. Both male to the bone.
Incidentally, I know only one woman who is truly into offal - and I'm convinced she's fibbing for effect. I once ate crispy pigs' ears at one of my favourite restaurants, La Trompette in London, and have regretted it ever since. I am too squeamish a soul to relish the prospect of tucking into anything that was once an orifice. As a rule, if women are about, snout is out.
How we eat
We'd rather talk, so often make slow progress with eating, like Liz Hurley or llamas at the cud. Men are much more inclined to perform these two tasks simultaneously.
As far as cutlery is concerned, men shovel, we shove. We also gesticulate with the silverware - which is, of course, bad manners. Though not as rude as demonstrating Steven Gerrard's ball skills using the cruet, an olive and grissini goalposts.
A note to male colleagues and/or lovers: once our (invariably small and low-calorie) order arrives, be aware that we actually want to eat yours too. So please don't order the pigeon simply to be obtuse. We'd quite like the toad-in-the-hole, though.
Where we want to sit
Preferably, looking out into the restaurant so that we can see if any good handbags/shoes or gossip walk in. Not too near the loos, mind, but near enough that we don't have to take a hike to get there. The facilities should, incidentally, be lit well enough to allow eyebrow plucking.
If, for whatever reason, we can't look out upon the melée, we'd like to look at ourselves. A large mirror behind the seat of our partner is a plus. If bored, we can privately debate Botox and whether our roots need doing.
The staff
A note to waiters: women generally like to have lots of details about provenance - so if something is ethical, local, sustainable or in any way cuddly, please say so. I once had a waiter in Aspen who talked lovingly about the particular variety of potato that was about to accompany my pan-roasted Alaskan halibut (women like 'pan-roasted' and 'seared'; we're not so keen on 'braised' or 'jugged'). Anyhow, this potato - a Yukon Gold, since you're interested - came from a family farm in Idaho, the produce of warm, God-fearing and honest folk. The potato had been loved! It is possible that they had bottle-fed it after its mother shunned it in infancy. The potato and I were practically on speaking terms when it was dispatched. It was as if we had bonded. Ah, a beautiful thing.
Another note to waiters: a little garnish of flirting never went amiss, particularly if the diners are all women. But no hovering. It puts us off our stride. A helicopter waiter is a fly in the soup, predominantly because we will be talking about sex. Lack of. Surfeit of.
Either way, we'll be sharing a pudding while we do it. Probably something that owes a lot to double cream, with a passing nod to fruit (if you think Eton Mess is a masculine dish, you are very much mistaken).
Finally, we're not finished until we're finished. Do not, please, remove a plate because it looks empty. There is still some chocolate fudge sauce over there at three o'clock.
