Psychology of food menu design

Menu hack for vegetarians&#x2F;vegans at meat-focused restaurants: Scan the ingredients across all plates on the menu: these are items that the kitchen has made or has readily available. Ask to swap the meat in a dish with something from that list.<p>Very useful in areas where &quot;I&#x27;m vegetarian, what do you recommend?&quot; is answered with &quot;we have this lettuce salad&quot;. And yes, that&#x27;s still a lot of places once you&#x27;re away from the east and west coasts.

I prefer places that have only a few items on the menu. I especially like restaurants which only have one menu item, and focus on making that one dish the best it can be. Too many menu options just causes anxiety and analysis paralysis.<p>If you go to a fancy restaurant like the French Laundry, they only have a prix fixe menu with several courses (usually at least 5). You get what you get (although they usually have substitutions for vegetarians).

I wish every menu would come with pictures for every item, if only because portion sizes are so unpredictable. Yelp has pictures sometimes, but they&#x27;re crowdsourced, so it&#x27;s usually only the popular items that have them.<p>Maybe the cost of getting good pictures and making longer menus is a factor. Or maybe it&#x27;s just another part of the &quot;psychology of food menu design.&quot;

&gt; According to an experiment conducted by Dr. Brian Wansink of Cornell University, sales increase almost thirty percent when menu items are accompanied by a well-written description. Diners also gave these items more favorable feedback and felt more satisfied after eating them.<p>This is interesting to me. Yes, these are sales techniques and the primary benefactor is the restaurant because they make more profit. But if the diner felt more satisfied after eating the better described food, is it also providing a benefit to the diner by subconsciously helping them enjoy the meal more? (nb: I haven&#x27;t looked at the study to see if the article is accurately representing what it said.)<p>(I can also say that the only time I have eaten at a restaurant with these kind of prices was in the late 90s when I was doing a website for one. They gave me free meals when I did the work on site, so I got to enjoy some expensive meals that were outside my budget. It was quite nice, but in the end I&#x27;m a $10 meal kind of person.)

Being aware of this can help you have a better time at a restaurant. Sure, the framed items might have a good margin, but it&#x27;s probably also something the head chef is willing to stamp the restaurant&#x27;s name on. If you&#x27;re not sure what to get and the boxed item isn&#x27;t outside your budget, just go with that.

It&#x27;s interesting to read the reasons behind some of these decisions. What frustrates me as a buyer though is the process of buyer remorse when I dint fully understand the options in the menu I buy something that sounds good but is not what I wanted as I just wasn&#x27;t able to parse it correctly.

Lol, this article is complete crap. No restaurant wants you to not order something. What they want is you, coming in the door, having a good time and ordering a bit of everything.<p>Now if some restaurants have items they feel differentiates them from other, they want you to have some of that.<p>But there was never an instance where, when I designed a menu (worked as a cook&#x2F;chef in some pretty high end places, including one ranked in the top 100 in the world), I ever wanted someone to not order something.<p>Edit - I love it, downvoted by a bunch of people who have likely never worked in a restaurant let alone designed a menu or ran a restaurant.

One thing the article doesn&#x27;t mention is the use of obscure words in dish descriptions.<p>Am I more or less likely to order something that contains endive, or is a ponzu? I don&#x27;t know what either or those things are, so I&#x27;d have to whip out wikipedia to find out. Based on your leanings you&#x27;re either way more, or way less likely to order something that you&#x27;ve never heard of before.<p>In my case it&#x27;s more, though the internet tells me that endive is licorice-flavored cabbage which sounds disgusting so...

I hated the menu where the prices were spelled out, e.g. &quot;NINE FIFTY&quot; and &quot;THIRTEEN&quot;. Yuck.

Another consideration is that you want to order something that the restaurant does well. They might have some things on the menu just to please people who are looking for some specific thing, vegetarians, etc. and these items might not be dishes they are very excited about.

Low-quality article about an incredibly interesting subject.

Original article (2009) I think a bit of a better read.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nymag.com&#x2F;restaurants&#x2F;features&#x2F;62498&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nymag.com&#x2F;restaurants&#x2F;features&#x2F;62498&#x2F;</a>

Animated menus at counters definitely need better design.<p>Every single one allows me to study it for 30 seconds, and then <i>the whole menu is taken away from me</i> while they play some pointless food animation.

So now imagine you could see menus of restaurants before hand. With plenty of details of it. Translated to many languages, if you may. Because, for tourists on certain places, sometimes, it&#x27;s difficult to get the meaning of what they are about to eat.<p>Put all this data indexed on a platform focused on menus and, you have <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lomenu.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lomenu.com</a>.<p>What are your thoughts on this? Currently it&#x27;s focused only to Spain, because the fact of gathering such an amount of digital information, and then transcript it to a indexable format to be useful on searches, it&#x27;s a big amount of work.<p>Would you think people running restaurants are willing to update their menus or daily menus in a daily&#x2F;week basis?