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. 

The Necessity of Passion

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style. 

Maya Angelou

I'm lucky. I love my job. It's changing at the moment, but I love that too.
Moving from teaching to my own business has been both scary and liberating. Scary, because I've spent my working life protected by the state. Suddenly, it's all on me. Scary, because I'm not getting my daily fix of fascinating company, doing what I know and love. And because I have to grapple with accounting programmes and other things that give me the heeby-jeebies.
Liberating, because my day isn't divided into strict time periods. If I'm interested in something I can just keep on doing it. Liberating, because I've escaped the demands placed on a teacher outside the classroom, which account for that glazed look and air of exhaustion most have.
And liberating because I love to learn stuff, so I'm just wallowing in new information and skills.

I'm discovering a whole world of people turning their passions into their businesses. Teaching's strange. On the one hand, you meet absolutely all the adults of tomorrow, but on the other hand, you tend to mix in a limited circle of actual adults, most of whom are also ready for bed at 9:30 (except for school nights, when it's 9:00).
So it's been great to encounter some fantastic people as I get myself started. I'm pretty good at writing and teaching writing (well, you'd hope so, wouldn't you!), but am not so good at lots of other things. Olivia Coleske at Ladybug Design, Mike Reaney and Jeff Vandelaar at MRD and Sarah Horn, the photographer, have all done two things for me. First, they've been knowledgeable, personable and helpful as I get started. Secondly, they've shown me what following your passion into a career looks like, if you've stepped out into the big bad world of the private sector.
I fervently believe that following your passion is the way to choose your path in life. When I was in the Sixth Form (now Year 12), I did what I thought was sensible and dropped French for Physics. BIG mistake. I loved French, but thought I ought to do something 'practical'. Since I have subsequently visited France a few times, a better working knowledge of the language would have been useful.   As for Physics, all I really remember is breaking the ammeter and sneakily reading a novel instead of the textbook. Since those far away days, I haven't done anything even remotely scientific (marrying a scientist helped me avoid the necessity).
I'm not complaining - language, writing and the subject of English have been my primary passions all my life and have sustained and rewarded me. However, it's worth thinking about what drives you to get up in the morning when you're making choices about subjects and then about jobs.
Which brings me back to Liv, Mike, Jeff and Sarah - I'm fortunate to have found four such passionate and skilled people to start me on this new journey.
My main hope for my own business is that I can help people communicate their own passions as clearly and persuasively.