Psychology of food menu design | Hacker News Reader

Psychology of food menu design

getmaelstrom.com

142 pointsnwcs55 comments

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.

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).

> although they usually have substitutions for vegetarians

Here in Montreal I only ever got "we'll make you vegetable stir pasta". I mean it's good, just gets a bit repetitive.

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.

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.

Who cares about whether it conforms to the tradition as long as it tastes OK? Should you also only be allowed to order a specific drink with each meal on the menu?

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.

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/

You may enjoy our foodblog of Shenzhen and surrounds @ http://gastronomicsociety.in/shenzhen/

This is a good Chinese restaurant, but you hint at a way to improve the menu. The menu should be a grid, properly displaying the matrix.

Large restaurants can pull off larger menus, but I agree if it is a small restaurant with a big menu some hacks are going on.

That being said in general Chinese restaurants tend to be able to pull off a larger variety of items with a smaller kitchen.

Yes, I can confirm that Chinese restaurants tend to be like that --- and especially when it's a local restaurant, I really like the fun of being able to think "what will I try this time?"

Another thing about them, that stands in stark contrast to the examples in the article, is that their menus also tend to be far less "designed" and more utilitarian; they're often not much more than tables of items with names/descriptions and prices. Here's an (very badly translated, but you can see the format) example: http://jasonandcodi.com/images/20070119/bigchunk.jpg

I actually prefer that style more, even before I read the article, perhaps because I have a subconscious and instinctive aversion to menus "Playing With Your Mind" --- which a highly stylised, price-deemphasising, limited-choice design seems to imply.

One of my favorite restaurants in the world, bar none, is in Olinda, Brazi, Casa de Noca[1]. You get to it through a network of tight cobblestone streets on hills, then walk through what appears to be a house, that somehow leads you out back to a large open air patio that has tables and chairs, and monkeys will sometimes run around the walls.

But their menu [2] is by far the most Apple-like experience I've ever gotten from a restaurant. They only offer 1 dish [3], which is 3 ingredients, and only in 3 different sizes. The components are those delicious blocks of cheese on top, carne de Sol (sun cured beef), and macaxiera (a potato like root).

And it's basically just big, bigger, biggest. And it's amazing, both in what they execute, but how easy the entire experience is.

To me, it's just cool to see restaurants, on both ends of the social status scale, pull off amazing food with a dedication to keeping things simple.

If you're ever in Recife or Olinda, I highly recommend it :)

[1] https://m.yelp.com/biz/casa-de-noca-olinda

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2ns7jioa1fao96/Photo%20Sep%2009%2...

[3] https://www.dropbox.com/s/1urjle4gv8z0hh8/Photo%20Sep%2009%2...

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."

I’ve always wondered why they don’t do this in America.

I would surmise it’s one of the reasons trycaviar.com took off the way it did. It swept people from sites like grubhub that had lower quality restaurants with no pics.

In Japan it doesn’t even end with pictures—most restaurants have realistic physical models of their dishes!

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/meet-makers-plastic-foo...

Japan definitely has a great tradition of see before you eat.

Once upon a time I was posted to Tokyo to do some integration work. I had a great time working with Toshiba, and wandering around the city.

However a constant pain was the language (not a surprise) and my personal food tastes. I'll eat anything that isn't fish. Several days I'd just select random foods based on conversation with the staff, or pointing to lines on a menu because they looked fun. (That was quite fun, some days I'd get a starter, other days I'd get a desert, and I'd have no clue what I'd ordered!)

The only day I was absolutely certain I'd get great food was the day I found a place to eat that had pictures of the food. I thought I'd ordered a hamburger, but what actually arrived was a fish-cake in a bun. And that is when I learned that photo-based-menus were still not terribly useful.

If there had been a symbol of a "fish", a "cow", or a "chicken" that would have helped, but a photo can't tell you the difference between tomato-soup and chicken-soup, nor between a hamburger and a fish-cake!

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.

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.

That's exactly what we are starting in https://lomenu.com with examples of QR linking to menus like this demo one: 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.

No pictures in your menu though.

How about an AR menu? http://www.kabaq.io

In some countries (Thailand comes to mind) having photographs of every single menu item is actually a relatively common menu design.

Yeah, and they aren't even particularly high-quality or appetizing photos. I think it's because tourists unfamiliar with Thai cousine would be pretty confused without them.

Some restaurants (e.g. in Japan) go even further and make actual-size, plastic models of the food. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_food#Use_by_Japanese_rest...

In Romania, many restaurants have weights next to every dish.

Or calories. It's not impossible, but I've seen just one non-fast-food restaurant do it: Gauthier Soho in London: http://www.gauthiersoho.co.uk/menu-1.php

The tasting menu is 1785 Calories -- excluding wine.

I am reminded of the scene from "Lost In Translation" where both main characters are comparing two menu-pictured dishes. It's remarked "they look exactly the same, what's the difference?". Comedy aside, similar might happen.

I do still find this a good idea.

> 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

After tax and tip… I'd be happy to have a beer for $10 to go along with my nonexistent meal.

FYI, Brian Wansink's work has been found to suffer from numerous, substantial errors.[1] A recent investigation found ~150 errors in four papers on a single set of pizza experiments.[2] I would be skeptical of any result he publishes without first understanding the methodology.

[1] http://andrewgelman.com/2017/04/06/dear-cornell-university-p...

[2] https://peerj.com/preprints/2748/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah pretty much. Menu consultants always try to apply some sort of arcane knowledge they think restaurant people don't have, that's the only way they justify their fee.

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.

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.

Criticizing people's judgement based on their perceived qualifications or experience is offensive and often wrong. Just because you did something doesn't mean you understand it better than someone who didn't do it. It can actually hamper understanding by narrowing your viewpoint or causing you to overvalue your knowledge. I see this all the time among poorly educated people - "I've driven trucks for 20 years, I know how dynamic instability works."

First, the article is from a consultancy. Not even one that specialises in restaurants, but one that specialises mostly in retail it seems from their website.

Now their arguments:

> Consider the following example from a restaurant in New York. The sweet spot contains two expensive seafood platters (plateaux de fruits de mer). With the added illustration and a touch of color, these items are designed to draw attention to themselves.

This part is correct. They obviously want to bring attention to their seafood choices.

> You can probably guess that these platters bring in higher profits than some of the other menu items.

This part is so far off it's not even funny. Seafood isn't cheap. Seafood platters don't have good food cost. There's no starches, no vegetables to balance the cost of the protein. The point of drawing you to these items is because seafood itself is a draw - it's the draw that brings you into the restaurant itself. And hopefully you get some bubbly, maybe some sides, or maybe you're just having oysters before your steak and red wine.

> Price It Right

You don't say...

Anyhow, restaurants are about hospitality. There's no funny psychology. Yes you want nice menus and yes you want nice descriptions. You want to bring in diners who order a bit of everything, with some alcohol. You cater to some tastes, offer new tastes, bring in novel items, at the end of the day you do want balanced ordering though, so as to have minimal spoilage. Your concept, decor and cuisine should differentiate, prices should reflect your market, but again, there's no funny business as far as menus go. Simpler is better, menus with less than 15 items are in vogue right now.

As for broadening my horizon - 10 years of high end cooking, 5 years serving and bartending, and I went to school for econ/business. I'm obviously here to learn about things like programming and technology, and I'd pretty good with both of those, having done CS courses and used various stats packages and languages throughout school. Restaurants do embrace modernity (POS systems keep track of sales mixes, and we'd examine them every single day, keep track of various trends, including past years, etc...), but what they don't embrace is leeches like consultants who prey on the mom and pop diner who aren't savvy enough to know the difference.

Also, the article was a pretty sad analysis of menu development and pricing. Might as well have been an ad in the corner of an industry magazine.

Not sure I can say it's complete crap. There's a fairly cheap place that list items like: - Chicken - Pork

And when I'm looking at the menu I'm thinking... ugh, can't really find anything that sounds any good. The food comes and it's amazing.

I go to a fancyish place and when it's described better, it sounds amazing.

I feel what the article said about describing food should be common-sense tbh

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...

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

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.

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.

Low-quality article about an incredibly interesting subject.

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

http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/62498/

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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