Given the below description, I agree to a point. Unfortunately, I never read the menu item at all (wife ordered it and I did not peruse the salad section) and the menus were gone from the table by the time the food came. So the below description, while fairly accurate, I never read. The one point of disagreement is in calling this a "Caesar" at all....how about a Tabernash Southwestern Salad?

Deceptive Menu Items
 

I've eaten at Tabernash Tavern a few times. It's "meh" at best, but the locals rave about it. The food at Devil's Thumb Ranch is far better, and I bet you can get an actual Caesar salad there!

At the risk of derailing my own thread, this brings to mind another food nomenclature that grates me (it's a US trend) -- the "grilled cheese" craze with all other kinds of crap on it. A "grilled cheese," from my birth until just a few years ago, involves just cheese and bread. The kind of cheese can vary (in our house, of course, it was most often the Kraft sliced "processed cheese food" that isn't cheese at all), and the bread can vary. But once you add anything else to it -- it's not a "grilled cheese" any more.

The proper term, I think, for a grilled sandwich that happens to include melted cheese, is a "melt". As in a tuna melt. Or a patty melt.

When you have a grilled cheese restaurant, and your "grilled cheese" involves free-range chicken and arugula and aioli on an artisan roll, that's not a "grilled cheese sandwich." It's a grilled chicken sandwich with arugula, aioli, and melted cheese, on an artisan roll.

Some might also find it deceptive if the salad isn't prepared tableside, because that is the proper prep.

If the menu is descriptive, nothing to see here, especially when the title was unusual.

Similarly, I order a Cobb salad from a place close to home, and it doesn't resemble anything that Mr. or Mrs. Cobb or any of their offspring would ever recognize. But it is tasty, and the menu lists all the ingredients.

(I don't think this was addressed directly in this thread)

I don't eat crab, but I'm curious about what disclosure is appropriate when dealing with the faux crabs/krabs.

I think here is where "normal" and "proper" part ways. In a lifetime of ordering a Caesar salad, I've only seen it prepared tableside maybe a couple of times.

In other words, experience governs expectations (and therefore possible deception), not propriety.

I will go back and say again that the menu seems to describe the salad appropriately.

There's no deception intended with crab sticks. They aren't shaped like crab and I have never seen them passed off as crab. They do sometimes feature on their own strength in Japanese cuisine.

They happened to be made in the same way as surimo lobster tails. There is deception with those. I memtioned crab sticks simply so people could understand somethfing similar that they may have experienced.

Ugh, end the madness!!! :D

Just check out the item description because as you have discovered
what you actually get may be something slightly or vastly different.

Big deal, I have had grilled cheese with a slice of tomato tucked inside.
It was delicious and I was not about to quibble with the chef about the
menu item name.

Surimi is a pox on the face of the planet. Yuck.

Oh dear ... one of our very favourite sandwiches is chopped up decent quality crab sticks with a marie rose sauce with some crispy lettuce in Hovis. So much nicer than prawns.

I guess this makes us people with no taste.

:D

In a seasoned wooden bowl.

As for deceptively named food, sweetbreads certainly come to mind...

Somebody earlier mentioned sandwiches. I never realized it, but apparently the Club Sandwich can just about consist of anything, IME. I don't think I ever get the same one twice.

I'm going to lump reubens into the same category. It seems like sauerkraut and thousand island dressing are the only requirements in the minds of some menu developers. Rye bread, corned beef and swiss cheese are all dispensible.

Sometimes yellow mustard in lieu of the thousand island.

I have regularly (though perhaps not often) seen krab passed off as crab in kaitenzushi and table-service mass-market sushi places, but usually in the omission rather than the commission. That is, the menu will say crab without clarifying that it's fake crab. If asked, though, they'll 'fess up to the fake stuff, and certainly on appearance at the table (whether from server or belt), it's obviously krab-with-a-k.

Have to agree that it's pretty near to a culinary scourge - I'd say it's scourge-adjacent. "Their own strength in Japanese cuisine" is pretty weak, IMHO.