Display Global Custom Taxonomy List Outside WordPress Loop

I have a catering website that has different food menus (I will refer to them as such to keep them separate from a webpage menu :-), each with a theme of items that belong to it (e.g. Italian->Spaghetti or Chinese->Orange Chicken).

To make the system easiest on another user that will be using this interface for adding items and/or brand new food menus, I figured I could make a custom post type of “Menu Items” and then assign a custom taxonomy to each item to group them together. That way when she wants to make a new food menu, she makes a new taxonomy, then starts creating items and assigns them that taxonomy value. Should be simple…

To display these items, I made a page called “Menus” and would like for there to be a navigation within this page that displays all of the “flavors” of food menus with links to drill down and show all of the individual items that comprise that food menu.

This isn’t working for me however. It appears as though I’m required to run any and all of my taxonomy queries in a loop to have them return values (I get a “bool=false” return by itself in just the page with no loop), but I don’t want a loop. I want a list of all of the taxonomies that are assigned to the post type of “menu-item”, then I want to use the taxonomy.php template to query for specific taxonomy types and display the menu items based on the criteria.

Does anyone know of a way to do this without creating a static interface on the (food) Menu page?