San Francisco Food Blog

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Sooner or later, everybody's gonna know.

​Last week, CNN picked up a Mental Floss story running down secret menu items at fast food restaurants, whispering of such sneaky exit-ramp pleasures as the grotesque four-patty Meat Cube at Wendy's, Taco Bell's unadvertised green chile sauce, and Fatburger's Hypocrite (a veggie burger crowned with bacon).

A few days later, Eater hollered about Hidden Menu, a brand-new Bay Area Web site dedicated to uncovering and sharing off-menu delights of a local ilk. The first entry concerns Pizzeria Delfina. To paraphrase, if you ask for a Magic Pizza, you'll receive the Panna (tomatoes, cream, basil, and shaved parmigiano) with sausage added. If you order a Purgatorio, you'll be tucking into one fine hellish breakfast: a thin-crust pie topped with pepper-laced tomato sauce, two eggs, and Pecorino. There's more, naturally: a fried meatball calzone, Zeppole (a dessert of fried pizza dough with mascarpone), and some brief half-hearted mention of a vegan pie the cooks will throw together upon request, all the while shaking their heads sadly.

People dig secret menus. We're pretty sure we know why: We get a kick out of knowing things other people don't know, especially when those things permit the exercising of mild cultural elitism. "Oh, the menu?" an obnoxious dining companion might chuckle as you both sit down to eat at an unfamiliar establishment. "We don't need the menu. I've heard the best dishes aren't even on there." Of course, once a secret menu gets bandied about, it's no longer secret. Should it still seek to camouflage a portion of its mystique, that restaurant will have to come up with a super-duper-secret alternative to its once-secret menu, that is, until someone finds out about it in some sneaky fashion -- perhaps from a friend who knows someone who works there. As with most secrets, someone always finds out.

Maybe restaurants will eventually abandon menus altogether, start rotating their offerings every few hours to keep diners guessing, and otherwise go to great lengths to ensure that anyone sitting down to a meal will have to pretty much blindly guess what's available every time. Maybe kitchens themselves won't even know what they're making. For now, should we hope Hidden Menu leaves a few secrets unturned, or celebrate every bit of knowledge it drops?