Restaurant Menu Trends | Hacker News Reader

Restaurant Menu Trends

nytimes.com

48 pointsprismatic59 comments

archive: https://archive.ph/KduPx/again?url=https://www.nytimes.com/i...

Amano, Caldwell, Idaho menu ("Bolder and brighter", 4th) is clearly inspired by an old "Engineer's Guide to Drinks"

https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2023-12-20-restaur...

https://imgur.com/a/quXezTP or https://i.pinimg.com/originals/98/03/42/98034295467ab2c16147...

It seems we've reached a critical "peak fried chicken". I imagine it will die down with beef prices falling dramatically in the last six months.

I hope we have reached peak fried chicken in the UK, it got out of hand for a while. I doubt it's going to be replaced with beef though, it's not as versatile and is a much less neutral flavour. People have also been conditioned to think red meat is bad for them in any form, but they seem fine with deep fried chicken.

> It seems we've reached a critical "peak fried chicken".

Apologies for the tangent, but I think this is worth sharing:

I recently discovered the big improvement that comes from brining chicken in buttermilk before frying it.

I can't believe it took me so long to clue in.

Kenji to the rescue: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-southern-fried-chic...

Thank you! I'll try out his ideas next time I make fried chicken. Can't wait!

I made this (slightly modified as chicken tenders) just a few weeks ago! Absolutely delicious.

Brining in buttermilk or yogurt before grilling or roasting is delicious, too. Mix in salt and whatever spices strike your fancy. When using yogurt, just scrape some but not all of it off before grilling.

I've been curious about the action of spices during brining / marinating. I.e.:

Does the flavor really permeate the meat? Or could we just added the spices during / after cooking?

And if the spices do permeate the meat, what's the mechanism? And how deeply do they penetrate?

> Does the flavor really permeate the meat? Or could we just added the spices during / after cooking?

You can taste the difference. We’ve done blind tests in terms of rushing the process and people always notice the difference. “Did you do something different today? The meat tastes bland/different/funny”.

But the difference is biggest between 0min and 20min. More than 20min doesn’t seem to make a big impact in flavor, it does make the meat juicier and softer tho.

> But if you flavor your brine with delicious things like fruit juices, stock, herbs, spices, sugar, and more, then surely your meat will be more delicious than if you just soaked it in a plain old salt-water solution. Sorry, but nope! Flavor molecules, unlike salt, are for the most part too big to penetrate the cell membranes of a piece of meat; your brine may taste flavorful, but your roast will not.

https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-dry-brine

I'd _highly_ recommend the book The Food Lab, and site Serious Eats. They both go into the science of cook and answer lots of questions like this.

There's some nuance here. If you soak your meat in lime juice for several hours, the acid is going to penetrate deep into the meat. It doesn't do nothing.

I don’t think it penetrates, no. But the yogurt preparation leaves a very flavorful crust as you don’t completely remove it before grilling. You definitely get the full effect of the spices that way.

Ive never tried that but it sounds intriguing / tasty. Would you recommend this for just poultry or red meat, as well? Pork?

I’ve only tried it with chicken, but I think it’s a middle eastern or Greek technique so I can imagine it being good on lamb or a kebab type preparation.

If you make your own yogurt just save the whey and use that with lots of salt to brine the chicken, it comes out awesome and it's basically free because the whey is a byproduct of making your own (much cheaper and much more delicious) yogurt from homo milk.

Beef prices falling dramatically? What's your source?

Yep, haven't seen this locally.

>Beef prices falling dramatically? What's your source?

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/beef

It's been on a steady decline since '22, with a big drop late last year. Anecdotally, I've been seeing choice ribeyes/strips locally for ~$6/lb in the last few months.

Eel river ribeyes used to be $11 at Whole Foods. They are now $18.99. This is a recent price hike. Prices are quite literally multiplying.

A single brand is not representative of the industry.

>Eel river ribeyes used to be $11 at Whole Foods

Grass fed is a totally separate category. Commodity feedlot beef has been falling precipitously, as mentioned. Currently eating a $7 porterhouse right now.

Great resource, thank you.

Looking forward to seeing these results in local stores.

Beef consumption has gone only in one direction. down.

I don't expect that trend to reverse due to prices .

Regardless of the menu, I would very much like restaurants to stop asking me "have you dined with us before" before explaining how "shared plates" work. I know how to eat, thank you.

Just answer "yes" whether you have or not? Presumably they'd skip the explanation then.

Hmm, some of these restaurants might want to rethink their font sizes and background colours, since their current menus are very hard to read. The one from Phuket Cafe with pink text on a pink background is damn near impossible to parse from a distance (or if you have less than perfect vision), whereas the examples of menus with tiny fonts are barely readable in general.

This is how we keep the old people out.

Or people who care about privacy and not scanning any QR code.

Or people who don't want to go scanning random crap that MAY be a restaurant code.

Or people who forgot/lost their phone.

Or people who intentionally have a feature phone to get rid of gamification crap.

But yeah... I guess it does keep out older people too.

This comes off as weirdly hostile to someone who is on your side. Not sure if that's your intent.

My bad. Sarcasm doesn't always land.

I'm 4 for 5 on that list (including being old). If I wanted to order in a kiosk, I'd be at McDonalds. I tip 20%+, but happy to tip less for less service. (Yea, I know, tips are really a byproduct of owners not paying wages)

I never scan QR codes, because you never really know where that code goes unless you printed it.

(And for what it's worth, most McD's have flipped their counter service with a human to be the same queue as the drive through. I just tell them I have cataracts and can't read the board, tell them triple cheeseburger, small fry, etc. My order goes in as the next car, but they bring it to the counter. On a busy day I get my food way ahead of anyone that used the kiosk, or walked in and used the app. )

Ah yes - Old age and cunning shall overcome newfangled technology.

There's an inverse correlation regarding font size and price - the smaller the font, the more expensive the menu.

At this point I'm ready to tip someone extra simply for having a menu. So many places have tried to hold on to the COVID menu QR code nonsense, and I just refuse.

Walked straight out of a place the other day for that reason.

Could I have a menu please?

Sir, you have to scan the QR code...

I have a flip phone

Oh... pause

Oh... longer pause

They literally had no solution to the problem

You're not in their demographic.

I mentioned previously a small Chinese restaurant in a mall in Silicon Valley which offered only a QR code. But it didn't lead to a display of the menu. It led to the onboarding funnel for a ordering app. Dine-in had been made a special case of food delivery, with a very short delivery distance. Terms of service and an EULA, of course.

We declined to be "onboarded", and managed to order from the counter.

> It led to the onboarding funnel for a ordering app.

I wonder if they get a kickback.

Saw that the other day. The waiter literally let the patrons borrow his own phone so they could order. What if there had been more tables in the same situation? No idea.

This has happened to me on multiple occasions when traveling abroad where I didn't have cellular service.

"Do you have wifi here?" Nope. "Can you just tell me what's on the menu?" Nope. Here, just use my cell phone.

Sort of related, in many parts of the world, thousands of people have the same Google account because when they buy an Android phone at the store, the vendor logs into the mandatory Google account.

That sounds apocryphal; android stores contacts in the google account by default. Any such account would have a million contacts.

If a restaurant can't provide me with a real menu, then I can't know what I can order, so I leave.

While I applaud the return of physical menus instead of the digital hell of QR-codes, I'm again reminded at how the absurd tipping culture seems to be getting worse in the US.

"By the way, all prices are 20% more than what you say here" would be illegal in most of Europe.

The real fun in the US is "service fees" that (along with sales tax) make the real price more like 50% higher than what you see on the menu

If they have a service fee, I hope they at least count it as a tip.

I've never seen a place that does that, although maybe they exist. The restaurants where I have seen service fees usually even put in the fine print something like "service charges are not a tip"

If a place has a service fee, that's a mandatory tip in my view, so I won't add yet another tip on top. And I won't be coming back to that restaurant.

In Italy restaurants frequently tack on an arbitrary cover charge per-person. They don't go out of their way to advertise this. I think it's more common at touristy spots though.

I am very thankful for tipping in the US. It provides an incentive for better service, allows me to express my gratitude to waitstaff directly, and gives me influence over the pricing that I do not have in any other kind of transaction. It's great!

I went to a restaurant, ordered from a physical menu, and a had a nice meal.

Then the server stood next to me and held his order taking gadget in his hand.

Apparently I was supposed to hand him my credit card at that point, and then take his gadget so I could type in a tip.

Yes, that’s how the rest of the world does credit card payments.

The US is the only country where it’s considered normal for the waiter to walk away with your credit card.

Normally here they hand you the device and you put in tip, then insert the card yourself, hit okay, enter your pin, and get the receipt, and then hand it back.

I thought it was super sketch when a waiter wanted to walk off with my card in the US. Besides that，how am I supposed to know they charged the percent tip I wrote on the receipt vs another number except by looking at my bill days later? I'm much happier being in control of the payment.

I had really hoped the QR menu trend would go away post pandemic.

It's really nice holding a physical menu.

I don't blame the restaurants that found the QR menus to be a cost savings/time savings.

I do think that this many years into it many of them still should figure out how to stop using desktop publishing software designed for printing, stop printing them to PDFs and use websites or other media more appropriate to reading things on your phone.

> I don't blame the restaurants that found the QR menus to be a cost savings/time savings.

I sure do. That's a choice the restaurant is making, so they get the blame.

That's not what that sentence means? To be fair it might be a regional colloquialism?

To rephrase: I understand and appreciate that restaurants have found QR menus to save money and time, so I realize there's a larger context to why these things will likely remain and why I'm willing to put up with them. Restaurants are certainly making a choice in which style of menu they present; I just understand it is a harder choice now with a new local minima for menu preparation cost/time.

Your rephrasing makes me think that I understood what you were saying in the first place. But perhaps my response was misunderstood?

All I'm saying is that when a business decides to conduct their operation in a particular way, that's their decision and if I find it objectionable, I will correctly blame that business for making that decision, and will avoid doing business with them in the future.

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