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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

> Photos of food and other products help create desire, answer common questions, and set expectations for a high-quality experience

Uhhh, no. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but here in England no restaurants have pictures. It's cheap and tacky, and it's a huge red flag when you encounter a rare one that feels the need to show you photographs of bowls of pasta/steaks. I defy you to show me any European restaurant that treats it's customers like children by showing them brightly coloured pictures of their food on the menu.

The only exception I can think of is the desert menus for Indian restaurants, but that's mainly because they don't really 'do' desert and just buy the ice cream and menus from some distributor as a package.

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Saying it's cheap, tacky, and childish definitely sounds cultural, since all of those are emotional rather than practical reasons. A photo can add a lot of important information what you are buying.

I would say try to be more objective because you may be missing out on opportunities to actually improve things.

I don't know of a serious American restaurant that does this. Even my local dive bar doesn't have photos of the food on the menu. The only place I associate with photos on a menu is fast food, and we all know those photos never live up to expectation anyway.

Most chain restaurants (places like Applebee's, Friendly's, Chili's) include pictures on their menus, especially pictures of drinks and desserts. Many independent Asian restaurants do as well and I've seen it in Mexican places too.

I've been to plenty of hole-in-the-wall Thai and Vietnamese restaurants with pictures on the menu. They are not chains.

It's helpful if you don't know much about what you're ordering (is it a curry? soup? stir-fry? etc).

Perhaps I can see value in it with those kind of restaurants (despite not seeing it myself, ever), but in the article the example given is a generic bowl of pasta. The caption given is "What was that great pasta dish called again? Oh yeah, this one in the picture!". No. There is so much wrong with that.

Also surely the menu would be ordered logically, with noodle dishes placed under a 'noodle' section, same for soups and curry.

I think it's fairly common in Japan too to have the elaborate plastic versions of the various dishes on display in the windows.

I'm not sure if this is a thing aimed at tourists or not, who might have trouble reading the menu but can visualise the dish easily.

>I'm not sure if this is a thing aimed at tourists or not

It's not. Even out where tourists don't go, beyond the reach of English menus, you will see the same plastic food samples. It is just nice to have an idea of what the dish is like.

I don't particularly appreciate the condescension behind

> I defy you to show me any European restaurant that treats it's customers like children by showing them brightly coloured pictures of their food on the menu.

Same in France, the only time you will have pictures is at a Chinese restaurant or some fast food place, I've never seen pictures in any traditional restaurant before. Maybe it's a cultural thing.

Japanese restaurants in the UK quite often have menus with pictures - my favourite one here in Edinburgh has a menu with pictures and it's certainly not tacky.

Edit: Here is an online version of the printed menu http://www.kanpaisushi.co.uk/kanpai_sushi_menu/

I have data about online restaurant decisions and I can tell you specifically that brits do want to see those photos. Including at the highest end restaurants.

Online is different. While ordering take out I would quite like to see a genuine picture of the food, but take out places just use stock photos so that's useless.

We're talking about in-house menus given to diners.

Edit: you must work for Deliveroo?

> We're talking about in-house menus given to diners.

When given an in-house menu, now days I pull up Yelp on my phone and look at the pictures of food that people have posted. It leads to me ordering things that sound boring on the menu but that look really interesting!

It also helps solve the problem of different people's understanding of what a dish is. I've seen a dish with the same name served boiled at one restaurant and fried at another!

Yelp's interface around this isn't exactly the best (not an intended use at all!) but the usefulness is amazing.

FWIW I eat at at a very diverse set of restaurants, so I often never know what I am going to get.

Harvester is a mainstream chain restaurant in the UK, http://www.harvester.co.uk/content/dam/harvester/pdf/DN15/ma... shows [some] images of food. They have very similar if not identical menus in the restaurant AFAIR.

Higher class establishments don't do it in general but it's not like it's unheard of in the UK to use food images on menus.

Wetherspoons used to show some images of food on their menus as well, but not because people forgot what a burger or a pie looked like.

I've only ever seen pictures on a 'proper' resteraunt menu once in the UK, it was only on the outside display menu. The food was beyond disgusting - I should have paid attention to the red flag.

> I defy you to show me any European restaurant that treats it's customers like children by showing them brightly coloured pictures of their food on the menu.

I agree it's cultural in the UK that this is tacky but besides that, why is it a bad idea?

See my comment below, I've found it's a pretty good indicator that the restaurant doesn't change its menu frequently.

Are you seriously saying that showing photos of the product you are buying is childish?

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