
Psychology of food menu design - nwcs
http://www.getmaelstrom.com/dining-theyre-playing-mind/
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nathancahill
Menu hack for vegetarians/vegans at meat-focused restaurants: Scan the
ingredients across all plates on the menu: these are items that the kitchen
has made or has readily available. Ask to swap the meat in a dish with
something from that list.

Very useful in areas where "I'm vegetarian, what do you recommend?" is
answered with "we have this lettuce salad". And yes, that's still a lot of
places once you're away from the east and west coasts.

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brndnmtthws
I prefer places that have only a few items on the menu. I especially like
restaurants which only have one menu item, and focus on making that one dish
the best it can be. Too many menu options just causes anxiety and analysis
paralysis.

If you go to a fancy restaurant like the French Laundry, they only have a prix
fixe menu with several courses (usually at least 5). You get what you get
(although they usually have substitutions for vegetarians).

~~~
sotojuan
My (and everyone's) local Chinese food restaurant has over fifty items in
their menu. I'm very boring when it comes to food so I always get the same
thing but I've always been curious about how many of the more esoteric (for a
Chinese restaurant) items are sold and can be made on the spot - I've seen
steaks and even Italian food in some menus.

~~~
jpatokal
Generally speaking, this is a sign of a bad Chinese restaurant practicing what
I call "matrix menus": you've got one array of sauces (soy, oyster sauce,
teriyaki, sweet and sour, satay, etc) and one of proteins (chicken, beef,
shrimp, salmon, tofu, etc). The menu is product of multiplying these, even
when the result is completely absurd from the POV of the original culinary
tradition (say, satay shrimp or teriyaki tofu) and everything is produced by
grilling the chosen items on the same hot plate.

Chinese restaurants intended for Chinese people tend to specialize in a single
style of dish: dumplings, hotpot, braised beef noodles, etc.

~~~
averagewall
Chinese restaurants intended for Chinese people serve food that westerners
don't like or find repulsive. "For Chinese people" doesn't mean better, it
means better for people who're used to that and worse for people who aren't.

~~~
titanix2
I guess it's just bad Chinese restaurants regarless of who they target. I
personnally rank Chinese food as high as French one; these people really are
genious when its come to cuisine.

Two of the best restaurants I ate at were in Taiwan (Kaohsiung) and almost
everything was delicious. The only challenging dish for a foreigner was
chicken-feet (jijiao) and century eggs (pidan). But I was warned beforehand by
the people who invited me and I tried them for the fun. But hey, it was pricy
for the country (25€/person) so I think the problem lies in the lack of
expensive Chinese restaurant in the West.

Edit: if you want to try a good Chinese restaurant and do not mind travelling
a bit, this one was very good:
[http://www.dfy.com.tw/](http://www.dfy.com.tw/)

~~~
contingencies
You may enjoy our foodblog of Shenzhen and surrounds @
[http://gastronomicsociety.in/shenzhen/](http://gastronomicsociety.in/shenzhen/)

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dguo
I wish every menu would come with pictures for every item, if only because
portion sizes are so unpredictable. Yelp has pictures sometimes, but they're
crowdsourced, so it's usually only the popular items that have them.

Maybe the cost of getting good pictures and making longer menus is a factor.
Or maybe it's just another part of the "psychology of food menu design."

~~~
userbinator
The pictures would have to be extremely large for that to be useful, or each
item very distinctive, since otherwise a lot of food tends to look like "blob
of stuff on a dish". I think listing the ingredients would be far more helpful
to understand what you're getting.

...and the obligatory "items may not be exactly as shown" disclaimer would
make pictures not reliable for portion sizes either.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Everyone has phones now. Ideally the menu would have a QR code that pops open
the menu in your browser. All the items could be hyperlinks that show those
huge pictures. That would be lovely.

~~~
davidpelayo
That's exactly what we are starting in
[https://lomenu.com](https://lomenu.com) with examples of QR linking to menus
like this demo one:
[https://demo1.lomenu.com/lagramola](https://demo1.lomenu.com/lagramola).

We just need to gather as many menus as possible from all over the world.
Currently Spain -Barcelona focused so far.

~~~
unkown-unknowns
No pictures in your menu though.

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abruzzi
> According to an experiment conducted by Dr. Brian Wansink of Cornell
> University, sales increase almost thirty percent when menu items are
> accompanied by a well-written description. Diners also gave these items more
> favorable feedback and felt more satisfied after eating them.

This is interesting to me. Yes, these are sales techniques and the primary
benefactor is the restaurant because they make more profit. But if the diner
felt more satisfied after eating the better described food, is it also
providing a benefit to the diner by subconsciously helping them enjoy the meal
more? (nb: I haven't looked at the study to see if the article is accurately
representing what it said.)

(I can also say that the only time I have eaten at a restaurant with these
kind of prices was in the late 90s when I was doing a website for one. They
gave me free meals when I did the work on site, so I got to enjoy some
expensive meals that were outside my budget. It was quite nice, but in the end
I'm a $10 meal kind of person.)

~~~
shostack
I remember when this trend started years ago. All of a sudden every restaurant
(particularly in the fast casual category) started adding farm names and
artisanal this or hand-crafted that. It was all still the same old frozen bulk
goods and the quality didn't change at all. The only thing that changed was
they marked up the price.

Then during the recession another worrying trend started--appetizer prices
started climbing dramatically to the point where they weren't really that much
cheaper than a main course. I recall reading something around how this was in
response to people trying to cut back significantly on restaurant spending by
just ordering appetizers instead of an entree.

These days it seems like the fastest growing item in terms of cost is drinks.
Toss some powdered drink mix or syrup into a glass with mostly ice and water,
call it something exotic like "Refreshing organic passion fruit spritzer" and
charge $4 for it.

~~~
SeoxyS
I remember eating at Oola in SF once and wondering what "hand-cut kennebeck
potatos" would look like. The answer: just regular old french fries.

~~~
averagewall
The idea that "hand-made" is somehow better never made sense to me. I can
understand it for a sculpture or painting where the feelings of the artist are
supposed to show through, but for chopping food, picking fruit, sewing
clothes, or assembling furniture? Either machines can't yet compete with
humans so "hand-made" just means "normal" or the human is going to do more
inconsistent and unhygienic job than a machine.

~~~
ghaff
I've had hand- and freshly-cut fries at a lot of places that to my taste don't
stack up to McDonald's. (To be clear, I mostly despise McDonald's but find
their fries to be better than those at many both chain and non-chain places
with far better burgers.

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komali2
Being aware of this can help you have a better time at a restaurant. Sure, the
framed items might have a good margin, but it's probably also something the
head chef is willing to stamp the restaurant's name on. If you're not sure
what to get and the boxed item isn't outside your budget, just go with that.

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evolve2k
It's interesting to read the reasons behind some of these decisions. What
frustrates me as a buyer though is the process of buyer remorse when I dint
fully understand the options in the menu I buy something that sounds good but
is not what I wanted as I just wasn't able to parse it correctly.

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Mikeb85
Lol, this article is complete crap. No restaurant wants you to not order
something. What they want is you, coming in the door, having a good time and
ordering a bit of everything.

Now if some restaurants have items they feel differentiates them from other,
they want you to have some of that.

But there was never an instance where, when I designed a menu (worked as a
cook/chef in some pretty high end places, including one ranked in the top 100
in the world), I ever wanted someone to not order something.

Edit - I love it, downvoted by a bunch of people who have likely never worked
in a restaurant let alone designed a menu or ran a restaurant.

~~~
QAPereo
The really important line:

 _Now, this isn’t some kind of a scam where the restaurant rips you off. The
restaurant can’t make you order you something you don’t want._

No kidding. That being said, maybe this all makes more sense in the context of
"stuff that doesn't work, but consultants can still sell" rather than ever
mattering to the diner.

~~~
MrTonyD
You know, there are marketing studies contradicting that. It is possible to
take people who don't want things, but present things to them as having other
characteristics which they do want. The end effect is people buying things
they really don't want. This was done way back in the 50's - and it is the
essence of propaganda.

Sometimes, being naive on a subject is dangerous. And trying to convince
others about "common sense" without informed knowledge is even worse.

~~~
QAPereo
I didn't say anything about "common sense" though, even a little. I also
didn't say anything about marketing or advertising not working, I'm just
talking about this specific situation which is pretty laughable.

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grabcocque
One thing the article doesn't mention is the use of obscure words in dish
descriptions.

Am I more or less likely to order something that contains endive, or is a
ponzu? I don't know what either or those things are, so I'd have to whip out
wikipedia to find out. Based on your leanings you're either way more, or way
less likely to order something that you've never heard of before.

In my case it's more, though the internet tells me that endive is licorice-
flavored cabbage which sounds disgusting so...

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PhantomGremlin
I hated the menu where the prices were spelled out, e.g. "NINE FIFTY" and
"THIRTEEN". Yuck.

~~~
dswalter
One of the rules that goes with more expensive seeming menus is that you
should pretend partial dollars don't exist. THIRTEEN is tolerable. NINE FIFTY
is off-putting.

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purplezooey
Another consideration is that you want to order something that the restaurant
does well. They might have some things on the menu just to please people who
are looking for some specific thing, vegetarians, etc. and these items might
not be dishes they are very excited about.

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futhey
Low-quality article about an incredibly interesting subject.

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aaron695
Original article (2009) I think a bit of a better read.

[http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/62498/](http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/62498/)

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makecheck
Animated menus at counters definitely need better design.

Every single one allows me to study it for 30 seconds, and then _the whole
menu is taken away from me_ while they play some pointless food animation.

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davidpelayo
So now imagine you could see menus of restaurants before hand. With plenty of
details of it. Translated to many languages, if you may. Because, for tourists
on certain places, sometimes, it's difficult to get the meaning of what they
are about to eat.

Put all this data indexed on a platform focused on menus and, you have
[https://www.lomenu.com](https://www.lomenu.com).

What are your thoughts on this? Currently it's focused only to Spain, because
the fact of gathering such an amount of digital information, and then
transcript it to a indexable format to be useful on searches, it's a big
amount of work.

Would you think people running restaurants are willing to update their menus
or daily menus in a daily/week basis?

~~~
puranjay
There's already Zomato.com. Massive collection of menus, at least for
restaurants in India. They acquired UrbanSpoon so they might have menus for US
restaurants too.

~~~
davidpelayo
But think about it as a dynamic entity. Something that evolves over time.
Because all restaurants change their menu at least twice a year.

Zomato tends to list dishes of a menu, giving the whole importance to the
restaurant information. Isn't a contradiction menus don't get the deserved
attention when it comes to compare what restaurant you want to choose?

What's the best way then to spread menus up to date all over the world? I
believe there is a need for one. A centralized cloud platform gathering all
menus together, giving the importance menus deserve. Good designed,
multilanguage and currency and so on. What do you think?

~~~
puranjay
I agree. The menus on Zomato are basically just scanned copies of restaurant
menus

I would prefer a database of the city's restaurants and their menus, all
sortable and searchable.

Say, I want to know restaurants serve Ramen near my home, I should be able to
do that. I should also be able to sort them by price, or number of variants,
etc.

The problem, of course, is data collection. If there is substantial traffic,
restaurants have an incentive to keep information updated themselves.

Else, you're going to have to rely on crowdsourced information with some OCR

