Gastronomic salience. The story behind the dishes

Food plays an important role when trying to draw holiday makers to a certain destination. Gastronomy often represents one of the experiences that highlight a destination for visitors and even induce them to return and savour it again. As a result, when marketing tourism, the promotional role played by restaurants and the relevance of presentation in general, of menus in particular, can never be underestimated. In the restricted space of one or two lines the name of a dish should convey information about the food offered while performing an important cultural and marketing function by encapsulating strongly tempting psycho-physical prompts in the wording. This paper explores the very linguistic structures which conjure up the narrative effect of dish definitions – and consequently their efficiency for marketing communication – by turning their preeminent textual dominance from merely descriptive/informative into narrative.