Hacker News Reader

Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

Minimalist menus would be the best thing to happen to most of restaurants. My favorite places are single page , single sided, list of perfected dishes. Especially the ones that change it up every couple of weeks. Less is more. I suggest anyone interested in that concept read "The Paradox of Choice". Too many options leads people to be overwhelmed and miserable by their choices.

View on HN

I consider lack of choice in a restaurant a good thing, and I am not the only one.

And it is not just the paradox of choice.

Simply, if a restaurant offers 20 different dishes, it means each dish gets 20x less attention than if you had only one choice. Less fresh ingredients, less time perfecting the recipe and preparation. Serving only one dish makes things simpler and the restaurant is going to spend more energy making sure it is worth it.

About choice. When I go to a restaurant, I just want to eat something good. But I don't know what's good, it's not my specialty. But the chef is a specialist, he knows what's good, so I want to rely on his judgment as much as possible. Like everyone, I have personal tastes, but a good chef can easily make me change my mind about things I don't like.

Usually, what I think is the best is a 3 choice menu:

The specialty, the one that gets the most love and ideally the one everone should take.

The alternative, a completely different dish for those with different personal tastes.

And another, simpler dish for the picky eater. For example, it can be vegan if none of the other two are, free of allergens, kosher,... The idea is to not let that person down if part of a group.

My uncle told a story about some restaurant in Italy, where everyone is seated at the same fixed time, and the owner comes out and announces:

"Tonight, dinner will be rib eye steak. It will be cooked medium rare. If that doesn't sound good to you, please feel free to leave now."

These exist in the US too. My favorite in Seattle is called Archipelago, the chef tells a story about each dish when serving them.

When I go to eat I go to eat X food item and the restaurant is only a means to the end. If they don't have X food I'll just go somewhere that does serve X.

>Simply, if a restaurant offers 20 different dishes, it means each dish gets 20x less attention than if you had only one choice. Less fresh ingredients, less time perfecting the recipe and preparation. Serving only one dish makes things simpler and the restaurant is going to spend more energy making sure it is worth it.

One of my favourite places has a decently sized menu (would say 40 items on there including starters/sides/deserts) while they aren't "the best" at anything, it's really good and I love the atmosphere.

I like the flexibility and that I can invite anyone there since the selection is varied and quality is reliable. I can't call my vegan sister to a smokehouse even if their ribs are the best I tried, can't take my wife to a fish restaurant but my friends could be in the mood for fish, I have no clue what my in-laws will want to eat when I have to take them somewhere, etc.

I hear chef celebrities say the same thing but frankly, these kinds of restaurants usually disappoint me, and precisely because of the paradox of choice.

Good chinese restaurants are the literal opposite of that philosophy: multi-page menus with hundreds of choices.

I don't want to pick between a meat I want but cooked in a way I don't care for vs a meat I don't want as much but cooked in a way I prefer. And that's why the chinese restaurants with large menus excel: they pretty much have every possible permutation and then some.

Right but the preparation for the meats doesn't really vary between most dishes and they're added as the last step.

Big marinating dishes of beef pork and chicken

I'd beg to differ. Really good Chinese restaurants in China tend to specialize ruthlessly, selling only a few items.

If anything, the "matrix menu" where you have X proteins in Y sauces for X*Y stir-fry combos is usually a "restaurant smell" indicating that they don't really care about the end product (satay salmon, anyone?).

> I'd beg to differ. Really good Chinese restaurants in China tend to specialize ruthlessly, selling only a few items.

What are you defining as "good"? Luxury restaurants?

Because I've been to hole in the wall restaurants in the middle of nowhere, and they'll have 20+ things on the menu and the food is generally delicious. I've been to higher end restaurants that have 8 pages or more. I've never seen anything with a tiny menu, except street stalls that only sell one or two items.

I'm definitely a person who prefers larger menus. Small menus make me worry more about what to order because it's usually 1 or 2 things I want, with 1 or 2 things I don't want in the same order. I also generally don't return because there isn't much else to try unless the few items are all appealing, which is rare. Longer menus at good restaurants keep me coming back to try new things.

I'd say 20 or 30 menu items is still a far cry from the usual American Chinese restaurant thing of four to six pages full of menu items in 8 point font.

My experience eating at hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Shanghai is that they put the menu up on a big board on the wall where everyone can see it. That tier of restaurant doesn't give you an individual menu. So the number of items is limited. You don't order a permutation of options; they list options and you order one of those. Some things come in multiple options (e.g. 孜然牛肉盖浇饭 "cumin beef served over a bed of rice", if present, is likely listed alongside 孜然羊肉盖浇饭 "cumin goat served over a bed of rice"), but those are just separate (adjacent) entries on the menu, not a "pick your meat" kind of thing.

Good = tasty! As a random example, Yang's Dumpling http://www.xysjg.com/ sells exactly one thing, shengjianbao dumplings, and all their outlets have lines out the door. Even the holes in the wall with 20+ items tend to focus on a well-defined theme, eg. you might have hand-cut noodles with a variety of toppings but little beyond that.

And yes, higher-end restaurants do tend to have longer menus, because in China these cater mostly to large groups and entertaining businessmen, and a key part of Chinese banquets is to order way too much food -- so much so that there's now an official CCP campaign to stamp out the practice.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/china-food-waste-o...

Literally permutating sauces does indicate low quality but that's just because chinese cuisine has so much diversity that a decent restaurant can offer a large variety of flavor profiles without really repeating itself. Personally I'm not so picky to specifically want salmon satay, but I am able to define some parameters, e.g. heaviness (steamed/stir-fried/deep-fried), spiciness, texture, types of proteins, ratio of food groups, etc and find a suitable combination of menu items.

Specialized restaurants can certainly be better at specific dishes, but at the same time, the lack of options can be detrimental. For example, my kids won't enjoy a meal all that much in a place that specializes in spicy hot pots. Or maybe one person in the party will think the food is too heavy or spicy, etc.

Yes, permutations is the key word here. Mexican restaurants tend to have this kind of food - where they combine just a few different base ingredients (flour or corn tortillas, meats, cheeses, beans, rice, and various sauces and toppings) prepared in various ways and just call them different things, the permutations of which could be in the hundreds. Italian food is very similar in that regard. For this kind of food, having large, multi-page menus might make more sense.

I was recently at a Rainforest Cafe (not my first choice but it’s a good place to bring guests for entertainment value) that had just reopened and they had a simplified one-page menu. I was surprisingly pleased since they normally had pages and pages of items, so many in fact that I usually just chose the burger. And guess what was on the new menu? A burger. Of course.

There's definitely a place for restaraunts with bigger menus, especially when you're dining with kids or people who generally dont stray far from what they know. The probable gripe is when the restaraunt really sucks at making 80% of what's on the menu. Not always the case, but it does happen a lot.

The problem is people are picky, and in groups the effective pickiness increases.

So the bigger menus were likely to address dad, mom, teen, and kiddo.

If a restaurant is just going to make four or five dishes, it starts getting perilously close to places like Chipotle.

Those picky people end up ordering the same exact thing off of every menu. Keep that as one of your ten options. Satisfy the boring people, and provide better service to people with some culture.

The book Freakanomics mentions that Westerners in groups tend to avoid picking the same thing to avoid looking too conformist (and the last people to pick are unhappy with their choice because they were railroaded into getting something odd like the Filet of Fish just to show they're their own person) while Asians tend to try to follow the herd even if it is not what they'd rather have.

> and provide better service to people with some culture

If it's uncultured to know what you want to eat then call me a savage.

Too much amazing food in this world to limit yourself.

A lot of food isn't that amazing, and some things some people just do not care for. You can dance around the preparation all you like, but I cannot stand the smell of eggs. Scrambled, over easy, whatever -- just the smell of them is terribly off-putting to me.

There's too much awful food in the world to force yourself to try all of it.

There’s a great Jazz club+Ethiopian restaurant in SF called Sheba that has “penne pasta” on their menu for people who want the Jazz but are too numpty to eat Ethiopian.

> If a restaurant is just going to make four or five dishes, it starts getting perilously close to places like Chipotle.

Not sure what you're on about here?

You're comparing bistros and restaurants with highly focused, individual dishes that they're perfected... with slop from a junk-food place like Chipotle?

I wouldn't call Chipotle junk, but you're otherwise correct.

Eating at a really really good restaurant is about trusting the chef to know what he's doing.

If he says there's one soup, just trust him. If it's bad, don't go back.

Maybe you're confusing Chipotle with Taco Bell? have you been to Chipotle?

Yes they both seem like pretty rough fast-food places?

No they're not. Have you eaten at Chipotle? No frozen ingredients. Everything is either made fresh there, or sous vide. No deep frying either (except for the taco chips.)

No sure a soggy burrito the size of a baby is ever great fast food.

Order the salad! You clearly have never gone there.

Is Chipotle classified as junk food place ? I find it better than most of the lunch places. Also I can kind of order a keto bowl without rice and beans.

I apparently got downvoted to oblivion, but the fact a raging debate over Chipotle's quality actually kind of proved my point.

The uber expensive small menu bistro will get undercut by fast-food-plus. Sushi is another good example.

This is why every restaurant has chicken fingers

I agree. People used to cook at home. Few restaurants could survive so they offered lots of variety. Now less people cook. The market can support more restaurants which should lead to more and more specialization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com