Wednesday 8 March 2017

Menu Matters/Menus Matter

Information and temptation: the essential elements of a good menu. And if you're serving me, consistent, sensible choices about grammar and punctuation.
Recently, I visited my son in another city.  He works in hospitality, so we spent five happy days sampling the local food. I'm not a food critic, so I'm not going detail where or what we ate. Instead, I want to talk about the menus.
Here's the coffee menu from a cafe/roastery that prides itself on great service, food and above all, great coffee.

This menu is heavy on information and feels like a wine buff's case notes: "NOTES// Floral, sparkling apricot, bergamot, super silky texture". I could have been scared off. Instead, the enthusiasm of the descriptions was seductive. The writer's adjectives aided my choice.  The information about each bean is a clever addition - it reinforces that owners are committed to quality: "This coffee placed 11th in the Honduras COE (Cup of Excellence) auction". and to ethical production: "soil health... biodiversity," "30 acres, 14.5 of which are farmed, the rest remains pristine highland tropical forest." This made me feel virtuous - like I was making ethical choices as well. I felt daunted trying to pronounce my selection, but they had sensibly numbered the options.

In contrast, this menu was off-putting:
 I hated the full stops after ingredients. Partly because I'm an English teacher, of course, and the punctuation didn't signal the end of a sentence. But also they seemed authoritarian, snobbish, reductive. The capital letters added to this 'shouty' impression.  The tight margins didn't help: the dishes seemed fragmented rather than cohesive when laid out like this. These design decisions made it difficult to decode what each dish was.
I was also annoyed by inconsistencies - usually, but not always, full stops were used; the dishes were laid out almost, but not quite, like a list. Overall, it felt like aesthetic decisions were overruling those about content. The menu seemed designed to impress - even overawe - the customer, rather than helping them. 
On the surface, not much is different about this menu:
There's the the same list-style description of each dish, and inconsistent use of '&' and 'and'. However, I found this menu much easier to read. The commas suggested the integration of each element in the dish into a harmonious whole. The 'defining' ingredient of the dish was listed first. It was laid out across the page, so I felt I was reading sentences, not fragments. 
Lastly, I'm a sucker for a menu that invites me in to the mind of the writer. The first did this by teaching me something and including me in the search for fantastic, ethical coffee. This menu achieves the same result through humour: 
A menu with a pun - hard to beat. Also, though, notice that we're being gently educated again, and that the writer seems both knowledgeable and passionate.
The careful construction of a menu may seem way less important than food or service. However, it's all part of the package. Unless the menu is informative and tempting, we're unlikely to feel guided to make good choices. Then we're unhappy. And then, of course, we're less likely to return. 



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