In the latest edition to our ongoing series on restaurant menu secrets, Jessica Hullinger wrote about some of the psychological tricks that restaurants use to boost sales:

• Customers get uncomfortable if they’re presented with too many choices. The golden number of options per category of food (appetizers, entrées etc.) seems to be about seven.
• Pictures boost sales of menu items by as much as 70%.
• However pictures also lower the perceived quality of the food – which is why high end restaurants rarely have photos on their menus.
• The price “$12.00” on a menu is far less appealing than simply “12”.
• Menus may often open with an expensive item – say a $100 lobster – to make a $70 item later on in the menu seem affordable.
• The most profitable items are strategically placed in the top right corner of the menu, since that’s where people look first.
• Profitable items might also be put in a box on their own to draw attention to it.
• Longer descriptions of food boost sales, in part because patrons think they’re getting more for their money.

Read about the colour schemes that menus use, the power of nostalgia, and more over here.

Source: Mental Floss

The Economist reviewed The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu and outlined some fascinating statistics from the book:

• Mid-level restaurants constantly describe their food as ‘fresh’ – indicating anxiety about how people perceive their food.
• The cheapest restaurants like to assure diners that their food is ‘real’
• Expensive ones avoid such terms – suggesting that their food is fresh or real would allow patrons to consider the possibility that the food could be anything else.
•  More expensive dishes have longer names. Each extra letter in a dish’s name roughly adds $0.18 to the cost.
• Filler words such as “tasty” bring down the price by 9%, since it’s clear the restaurant has nothing useful to say about the food.
• Expensive food is sexy. High end restaurants may describe their food as “seductive” or “orgasmic”.

Read some other fascinating insights, find out why people like to describe their guilty pleasures as ‘addictive’, get some insights about reviewers, and more over at the full article here. We can only imagine how good the book is which you can find here.

Source: The Economist

Megan Garber looked at the design of restaurant menus:

• A restaurant’s menu, says the head of menu design at IHOP, is “the single most important representation of the brand in the restaurant, other than the building itself”.
• The first menu appeared in France during the 1700s.
• Before then restaurants would serve whatever food they wanted to serve and people would play a flat price to eat at communal tables.
• In recent times there has been criticism of menus that are too long. Simple chains that focus on a few items such as Chipotle’s have been successful.
• Menu designers have to consider things such as lighting in the restaurant and how things might get darker towards the evening.
• Colours also change by season. Applebee’s menu has brighter colours in spring.
• Menus are living documents. They’re usually updated every few months with some experimental dishes. If those dishes are successful they make it onto the permanent menu.

Read about how menu design is like web design, the menu’s Chinese origins, and how IHOP’s menu redesign helped boost sales over here.

Source: The Atlantic

We’ve previously outlined a critique of the children’s menu. Turns out that adult ones aren’t that great either, at least according to Geoffrey Gray:

• Menus don’t provide enough of the information that we need. Most just list the ingredients – not how they’re cooked – which isn’t really enough information for patrons to know what they’re about to get. Instead they usually have to clarify with their server.
• They also provide a lot of information that we don’t need. Advertizements for the Chef’s new cookbook; information about the locally sourced farms from which the ingredients come from, and other tidbits that don’t help customers make their dining selection.
• Customers read the menu to find out what they would like to order. Restaurants, however, design it to sell the items with the greatest markup.
• The menu kills conversations. As soon as one shows up on the table people stop focusing on one another and on the menu instead.

In the full article Gray talks about the history of the menu and provides a five step framework to create a useful menu. Read it here.

Source: New York Magazine

Michele Humes presented “a brief history of the children’s menu”:

• Before 1919 children didn’t really eat at restaurants. These were meant for adults who could engage in “boozy grown-up fun” in a child free environment.
• Then prohibition happened and restaurants desperate to find a source of revenue that could replace alcohol started offering children’s menu to cater to a new class of customers.
• At the time a book by a pediatrician called “The Care and Feeding of Children”, was the seminal text about raising children. It stated that they should not be given “fresh fruits, nuts, or raisins in their rice pudding” and that items such as pastries, ham, bacon, tomato soup, or even lemonade were forbidden.
• These rules against…good food seemed to have been laid down because the pediatrician behind the book “believed there was moral danger in sensual pleasure, and damnation in indulgence”.
• The popularity of the book meant that restaurants soon began to advertise their meals as being “approved” by pediatricians.
• Since then our views about raising children have become more enlightened but parents have become attached to the low prices on the children’s menus, while kids appreciate having the booklets that can also be used as clown masks or have cut out paper airplanes.
• Times may have changed but the bland and unhealthy food on children’s menus hasn’t.

Read more about the hotels that pioneered the children’s menu, how it has evolved over the years, and more over here.

Source: Slate