This contribution analyses a large corpus of over 20,000 German-language menus from seven major German cities with around 1 million dishes for the use of adjectives as central linguistic means for making for the detailed description and evaluation if dishes. The focus is on the question of how the descriptive and evaluative functions of adjectives are used in the text type menu, which has to fulfill informative and advertising purposes. In frequency-orientated approaches, it is shown that both dimensions of meaning are relevant for menus and correlate with certain syntactic patterns. In addition, menus from restaurants of different national cuisines are analyzed comparatively with regard to the typical use of adjectives. The article thus makes a focused empirical contribution to culinary onomastics.