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So if you lose your phone, forget your phone, if you don't have any battery, or if you have any internet issue, you can't order.

You cannot have the whole menu in front of you, you have to scroll and change sections. If it's cold, you can't order without talking your gloves off, if it's sunny, you better have a very bright phone or the menu will be unreadable.

As everything in China, you cannot pay without being electronically tracked, and you can't give a tip without going through a system that will likely take a cut. I will refrain to reach the Godwin point here since I assume it's been debated ad nausaum.

And of course, if something is not on the menu, you can't order it.

As usually with systems that are 100% digital, it gives you zero margin of maneuver outside of the happy path.

I don't want every restaurant to turn into a Mac Donald. If I want Mac Donald's, I go there.

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McDonalds (and most of their competitors) are actually pretty good/ok for customizations. Usually what's missing is some edge cases like "no ice" or fully exhaustive lists.

This is not entirely correct, many places still do accept cash and allow you to order without your phone. It just so happens that most people prefer to order and pay by phone.

Just like they prefer having the great firewall protecting their internet connexion ?

We had a sushi restaurant (in Canada) that belonged to Chinese expat that worked with the whole QR code + order + pay on your phone and I did find it pleasant. I would go as far as saying that I prefer it.

It might be cultural, but I can count on a single hand the number of times I went to a restaurant and the interaction with the waiter/waitress improved the overall experience.

> It might be cultural,

Or it might be personal.

> And of course, if something is not on the menu, you can't order it.

... That's how it works right? The menu shows what they are offering and then you pay them. Why would you expect things not in the menu?

While it is not something common, it just happens.

In Australia the food culture is you can customize almost anything on the menu and customers expect to be able to pretty much choose whatever combination they want as long as you have the ingredient and they can pay for it.

In France, a menu may not contain something you can eat, but some restaurants will create a full dish for you on the spot. It's very common restaurants with a Michelin star for example: as a veggie and foodie, I get regularly this treatment since french cuisine is very centered on meat. Some restaurants have the menu changing every day (I ate in one this week) depending of the farmer's market. The waiter just let you what's available. I know of at least one restaurant with no menu: you express a theme, and the chief will try to invent something matching it.

In Thailand, there was a restaurant were I used to go that had a regular menu for tourists with high margin meals, and a secret menu for regular customers that was actually good.

In Mali and Argentina, some restaurant menus are fake. You can't order most items, while there are items that you can get pretty much everywhere (riz au gras, pollo a la milanesca) even if it's not in there.

Now, it's tempting to decide that one path is optimum and shape society to only provide it. However, you kill diversity, margin of security, innovation, charm, and so on.

Don't get me wrong. Making the happy path the easiest and proffered way is OK. Offering a digital menu and payment system as a main option is great.

But making alternatives close to impossible is, at best, a good way to end up with with a bland life, and at worse, will create a dangerously inflexible and intolerant system.

It's why we should keep cash, paper forms and phone support despite the automated main experience been more efficient when all goes well.

> In Mali and Argentina, some restaurant menus are fake. You can't order most items

How's that work?

They give you a beautiful piece of paper, and when you order something on it, the waiter tells you it's not available.

After the 10th item on the menu not being available, you start to understand that the menu is more like a checkbox a restaurant must have to appear worthy of the name, rather than an actual useful object.

Not all restaurants are like that in Bamako of course.

But it's a great fun to take new comers to diner, and let them be puzzled for a while until reality sink in. I still remember my first time, my colleague looking at me ordering ice cream with eyes saying "oh, sweety...".

I'll let you in on a little secret: you can order anything they can reasonably make without inconvenience. E.g. "Can I have a vegetarian version of this?" often yes, sometimes no, but you can ask.

I’ve never had trouble ordering a custom dish or special options. If there’s a price difference, the server tells us what to order on the menu, and tells the kitchen what to actually make. If it’s a family shop, sometimes they update the menu for next time.

I’m sure there’s places that won’t let you order off menu. I wonder whether QR menus increases the number of them, though.

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