In his recent memoir "The Devil in the Kitchen," famed British chef Marco Pierre White recalls asking a Michelin inspector for advice on earning his second star.

The inspector replied, "If you start serving amuse-bouches and improve your coffee, you won't be a million miles away." White realized that the inspector was making a point about the impact of the first and last bite of the meal.

Although this was certainly very good advice, a meal actually begins well before the first bite arrives -- with the menu. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can tell an awful lot about a restaurant's food from the language of the menu.

That's why it's so frustrating to come across misspelled words and confusing descriptions. These errors are distracting and dispiriting -- when I notice one, I can't help but imagine that the finished dish is somehow affected by the mistake.

The most common misspellings involve foreign words, especially French words. In the past six months I saw veloute spelled at least four different ways at various Pittsburgh restaurants -- everything from veloutay to velute. One would think that a restaurant would double-check the spelling of unfamiliar words and their meanings. Furthermore, words such as veloute (a light stock) are common enough to be verified easily in any culinary dictionary.

Of course, errors are not always French. After just a few minutes scanning online menus of various Pittsburgh restaurants, I found "chedar" for "cheddar," "sandwhich" for "sandwich"; and, hilariously, "filet minion" for "filet mignon."

Certainly, most of these are merely typos, and perhaps it is uncharitable to judge them so harshly. But some of these misspellings indicate a deeper problem. You don't need to know how to spell "steak" in order to cook a steak properly. But writing a menu and cooking a menu both demand attention to detail and the consistent enforcement of standards. If a menu has a glaring typo, are standards slipping in the kitchen as well?

Great menus need not describe each dish as if it were a poem. One of the many ways in which the renowned Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse turned American fine dining on its head was to introduce a new style of menu that favored writing in English, focusing on ingredients and minimizing descriptions.

Right now, Chez Panisse is serving, for example, "Bellwether Farm ricotta and fava greens ravioli with fava beans and mint." There's no need to describe the ravioli as delicate, the mint as spicy or the ricotta as creamy. By paring down the menu to its component parts, Chez Panisse staff allowed the food, even just the ingredients, to "speak" for themselves.

Just as an unkempt server can immediately make a diner lose his or her appetite, a typo on a menu can shake my confidence in the kitchen. An attractive, error-free menu is another way for restaurants to make a positive impression on diners before they even take a bite of the food.