10 ms·
Restaurant Menu Trends
- brudgers 3y agoarchive: https://archive.ph/KduPx/again?url=https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/22/dining/restaurant-menu-trends.html https://archive.ph/KduPx/again?url=https://www.nytimes.com/i...
- CM30 3y agoHmm, 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.
- polynomial 3y agoThis is how we keep the old people out.
- pierat 3y agoOr 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.
- elicash 3y agoThis comes off as weirdly hostile to someone who is on your side. Not sure if that's your intent.
- polynomial 3y agoMy bad. Sarcasm doesn't always land.
- AstroJetson 3y agoI'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. )
- AareyBaba 3y agoAh yes - Old age and cunning shall overcome newfangled technology.
- SkipperCat 3y agoThere's an inverse correlation regarding font size and price - the smaller the font, the more expensive the menu.
- ramesh31 3y agoAt 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.
- 15457345234 3y agoWalked 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
- Animats 3y agoYou'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.
- flir 3y ago> It led to the onboarding funnel for a ordering app. I wonder if they get a kickback.
- Biganon 3y agoSaw 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.
- jjjjj55555 3y agoThis 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.
- ramesh31 3y agoIt 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.
- have_faith 3y agoI 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.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago> 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.
- throwup238 3y agoKenji to the rescue: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-southern-fried-chicken-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-southern-fried-chic...
- CoastalCoder 3y agoThank you! I'll try out his ideas next time I make fried chicken. Can't wait!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shepherdjerred 3y agoI made this (slightly modified as chicken tenders) just a few weeks ago! Absolutely delicious.
- mihaic 3y agoWhile 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.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoThe 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
- BerenOfEdain 3y agoIf they have a service fee, I hope they at least count it as a tip.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoI'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"
- JohnFen 3y agoIf 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.
- jjjjj55555 3y agoIn 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.
- Strang 3y agoI 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!
- lupire 3y agoI 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.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoYes, 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.
- Tyr42 3y agoNormally 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.
- BerenOfEdain 3y agoI had really hoped the QR menu trend would go away post pandemic. It's really nice holding a physical menu.
- kronks 3y ago[dead]
- WorldMaker 3y agoI 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.
- JohnFen 3y ago> 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.
- WorldMaker 3y agoThat'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.
- JohnFen 3y agoYour 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.
- mvdtnz 3y agoRegardless 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.
- JohnFen 3y agoJust answer "yes" whether you have or not? Presumably they'd skip the explanation then.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoAmano, 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-restaurant-menus/_images/amano-@@-900@x2.webp https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2023-12-20-restaur... https://imgur.com/a/quXezTP https://imgur.com/a/quXezTP or https://i.pinimg.com/originals/98/03/42/98034295467ab2c1614742b1847cf60d.png https://i.pinimg.com/originals/98/03/42/98034295467ab2c16147...