A disappointed guest is comparing the plate in front of them against something that does not exist: the plate they imagined when they read the menu. You wrote that. Which means a share of your bad reviews were authored, in a real sense, by whoever last edited the descriptions — usually years ago, usually in a hurry.
This is separate from charges and surprises, which are their own audit. This is about the words describing the food.
1. Adjectives the kitchen cannot deliver
Generous. Hearty. Loaded. Melt-in-the-mouth. Famous. Every one of these sets a bar and none of them is checkable at the point of writing. The word generous on a menu is a promise about portion size that your spec sheet then has to honour, and it is the reason a perfectly standard portion can generate a portion complaint.
Rewrite: describe rather than praise. "Slow-cooked shortrib, 8oz, with mash" tells the guest more and promises less. Weights and counts are your friends; they cannot disappoint anyone who read them.
2. Missing the thing that would have stopped the order
Heat level. Bones. Whether it is served pink. Whether the fish has skin on. Whether the "salad" is the whole dish. These absences produce a specific and avoidable review: "nobody told us".
Rewrite: state the one attribute most likely to change someone's mind. It loses you the occasional order and saves you the review plus the comp.
3. Names that require the description to be read
Named dishes — The Ommu Stack, Chef's Board — mean the guest must read on to learn what it is. Most do. Some order on the name and the theme of the menu, and those are the ones who are surprised.
Rewrite: keep the name if it is doing brand work, but make the first three words of the description literal. "The Garden Board — five cheeses, no meat."
4. The word "salad" and its relatives
Salad, bowl, plate, sharing, small. Each covers an enormous range of sizes and every guest has a private default. "Sharing" is the worst of them: sharing between two, or four?
Rewrite: put a number on it. "Enough for two as a starter." Ambiguity in size is the single most common ordering-friction complaint, and it also drives the menu-confusion signal in four-star reviews.
5. Sides that are and are not included
Covered from the money angle elsewhere, but there is a pure language version: a main described with a component that turns out to be an optional extra, or listed with a comma that reads as inclusive. "Ribeye, peppercorn sauce, chips" is a dish. "Ribeye, peppercorn sauce, chips" where the last two are £3 each is a complaint.
Rewrite: inclusive items in the description, optional ones in a separate line with their prices. Never the same visual treatment for both.
6. Provenance claims nobody can verify and everyone will check
Local. Line-caught. Dry-aged 35 days. Homemade. These raise price tolerance, which is why they are there, and they also raise scrutiny. A guest who paid extra for homemade pasta and suspects otherwise writes a much angrier review than one who paid for pasta.
Rewrite: keep only the claims you would be comfortable being asked about at the table, and brief the floor on the answers. Delete the rest. Homemade on a bought-in item is a genuine reputational risk, not just a value one.
7. Menus that make the decision hard
Not any single line, but the document. Fifty-four mains across nine sections with no visual hierarchy produces "took us ages to decide", "too much choice", and — the expensive one — guests defaulting to the safest cheapest thing they recognise.
Rewrite: fewer items, clear sections, and one obvious recommendation per section. Decision friction is real and it shows up in reviews as a vague dissatisfaction that is very hard to trace back to its cause.
How to find your own
Do not start with the menu. Start with the reviews, and search the text for expected, thought it would, assumed, didn't realise, wasn't told and turned out to be. Those six phrases are the signature of an expectation failure, and each hit points at a specific line of your menu.
Then read that line as though you had never eaten the dish. Most operators can no longer do this for their own menu — the description reads correctly because you know what arrives. This is why the exercise works far better with someone from outside, and why it needs doing after every menu change rather than once.
Sit the three most-complained dishes next to their descriptions and ask a single question of each: what would someone who has never seen this food expect? The gap between that answer and the plate is your review.
The reviews will keep telling you which lines are wrong, in ones and twos, across months. Reading them that way is the difficulty — a menu-language problem looks like nothing at all in a single review and is obvious in thirty. OMMU holds the thirty, so a description that has started to mislead people surfaces as a note rather than as a slow decline you notice a year late.