Menu Matters

Sure, menus are a linear experience disguised as choices.

Rich 60 year olds have been eating at restaurants for decades, though, and maybe only using smartphones and software for a few years.

This is a big deal when the average age of a congressman is 55 and senator 60. Why?

Menus are a kind of retail that manipulates your psychology. So is Amazon, and in some senses YouTube and Facebook. Those things have a bigger impact in our lives than menus, but people barely understand how software works.

If you wanted to communicate to a congressman (or the public really) why profit-optimizing collaborative filtering looks like a series of choices, but is really an experience that tells you what to do, good luck using that abstract algorithmic language.

But a restaurant menu? At least they'll know what the hell you are talking about.

Ironically, the most relevant part of this piece for the software audience will probably be, "Oh great, I can explain to investors how my product recommendation engine funnels people into the best-paying affiliate products, even though it's disguised as an informed choice, by using the metaphor of a menu."

I remember the first time I saw "Scottish Salmon" on a menu. It was the only salmon dish on the menu, so I'm not exactly sure why they were trying to differentiate it. Was it just to justify a higher price for it? What other adjective command a price premium?

What I did know is that more important than where a salmon is from (whether it be from Alaska or Norway) is if it is wild or farm raised. The fact that it was called out as "Scottish" but not "wild" made me think this wasn't going to be a particularly good dish.

Finally, I thought, did any 3rd party actually verify that this salmon was, in fact, from Scotland? Would the restaurant get into any trouble if I happened to be a super salmon taster and determined that this salmon was in fact from somewhere else and alerted the authorities?

All in all I was surprisingly disconcerted by this one little adjective on the menu, and I don't think that was the restaurateur's intent.

Anyway, if menus are of interest to you, the New York Public Library has a digital collection of menus going back to the 1800s: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-buttolph...

> helped differentiate a modern dining concept — the restaurant — from the coarser table d’hôte, where your choices depended on whether the proprietor liked you...

And as is customary with fashion, the table d’hôte is now an exclusive, where it can be used to connote "freshness" (itself another concept called out in this lovely essay).