Secret Menus and more on Charlotte Roche

Chuck Wendig offers the secret menu of writing advice.

This is a great post, though I wonder whether secret menus in restaurants are primarily a US thing. Because I don’t know of any secret menus at German restaurants. That is, if a particular dish used to be on the menu and no longer is, many restaurants will still make it for you, if you ask for it and if they have the ingredients at hand. For example, in the restaurant where my cousin used to work as a chef, there was a particular sandwich that had been on the menu ages ago and that they would still make on request.

Still, secret menus in the US sense are a strange concept. I suppose they are intended to foster customer loyalty by making customers feel like part of a secret club, the ones who are in the know. But how useful is that idea when everybody knows the secret code. Even I know about the Animal Style burgers at In ‘n Out and I have never even set foot inside the chain.

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A few days ago, I complained about the ubiquity of TV show host/interviewer turned confessional sex writer Charlotte Roche in the German media.

Now literary critic Dennis Scheck offers a fabulous take-down of Ms. Roche’s latest oeuvre in this clip from the arts and culture TV program Kulturzeit. Hilarious and oh so true.

Scheck is my favourite of all the literary critics that sometimes hold forth with their ponderings on German TV. And the best thing about him is that he is genre friendly and also recommends genre fiction and even graphic novels on his show.

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