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Comment by Niksko | Hacker News Reader

Huh, maybe that explains why living in Australia, I don't understand the hate for QR code menus. Basically everywhere that has a QR code menu over here these days also lets you order and pay via the same QR code.

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Oh, that's a total gamechanger. If looking at the QR code menu allowed me to also order from it, it would have made it much superior to physical menus, no argument. Sadly, I've never encounteted it across many restaurants with QR code menus in a major city (Seattle). Every single time it was either a link to the pdf version of the printed menu or their website with the menu.

Order and pay is the standard these days in Australia. It's pretty rare to find somewhere that has the menu but nothing else as a qr code (why not just look up the restaurant's website in that case?).

Pardon my ignorance, as I haven’t been to a restaurant since the pandemic started. How does that work when you have 2 or more people you’re ordering for? Do you pass the phone around? Do they have to look at it and tell you what they want and you enter it? Do you ask them, “Do you want X? No? Y? What about Z?” Sounds like a huge pain to me.

They open the menu on their own phone and tell the person doing the ordering what they want. An upgrade over physical menus, of which you often get only one copy for your table. I don’t miss passing a physical menu around and wasting five minutes on each person.

I haven't seen one menu per table, in well, I don't know if I've ever seen that except at a bar late at night.

Some places have the table number encoded in the QR code. Others you type it in. Everyone at the table could put in their own orders on their own phones if they wanted to, or one person could enter them all in. For the former it makes it very simple for everyone to only pay for their own things too.

Honestly, as someone with young kids it's been an absolute dream. We can scan or tap as soon as we get to the table, one of us can quickly fire off some order for food and drinks for the kids, and more often than not things have arrived before we've finished unpacking the coloring books and other things to keep them occupied. At which point the adults can sit down and chat, which is usually the main reason we're out, and order at our leisure.

It depends on the venue and provider. A lot of pub type settings will have a note saying that orders placed within 5 min of one another will come out together. In my experience the more upmarket the place, the less likely they are to have ordering via phone (or payment at the time of ordering).

But you can also get someone at the table to place the order for everyone. Or often go and order at the bar (also something that you don't see too much in North America), or if its a restaurant grab a member of staff and order in a more classic way.

They use their own phone to order.

I was largely thinking about being there with kids who wouldn’t have their own phone.

Here in the Upper Midwest of the United States, it's almost all just links to websites that aren't mobile friendly and PDFs

I live in rural Australia and have never seen a QR code in a restaurant.

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