May We Suggest: Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion

By Alison Pearlman

An art expert takes a critical look at restaurant menus—from style and layout to content, pricing and more—to reveal the hidden influence of menu design.
 
We’ve all ordered from a restaurant menu. But have you ever wondered to what extent the menu is ordering you? In May We Suggest, art historian and gastronome Alison Pearlman focuses her discerning eye on the humble menu to reveal a captivating tale of persuasion and profit.
 
Studying restaurant menus through the lenses of art history, experience design and behavioral economics, Pearlman reveals how they are intended to influence our dining experiences and choices. Then she goes on a mission to find out if, when, and how a menu might sway her decisions at more than sixty restaurants across the greater Los Angeles area. What emerges is a captivating, thought-provoking study of one of the most often read but rarely analyzed narrative works around.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781572848221

Book preview

MAY WE SUGGEST

MAY WE SUGGEST

Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion

ALISON PEARLMAN

Copyright 2018 © by Alison Pearlman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pearlman, Alison, author.

Title: May we suggest : restaurant menus and the art of persuasion / Alison Pearlman.

Description: Chicago : Surrey Books, an Agate Imprint, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021593 (print) | LCCN 2018024199 (ebook) | ISBN 9781572848221 (e-book) | ISBN 1572848227 (e-book) | ISBN 9781572842601 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781572848221 (eISBN)

Subjects: LCSH: Gastronomy. | Cooking. | Menus. | Restaurants.

Classification: LCC TX633 (ebook) | LCC TX633 .P32 2018 (print) | DDC 641.5--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021593

First Printing: October 2018

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Surrey Books is an imprint of Agate Publishing. Agate books are available in bulk at discount prices. For more information, visit agatepublishing.com.

In memory of my dear father,

Daniel David Pearlman

(1935–2013)

This is the first book of mine he wasn’t able to read drafts of, or offer, as he always did, with gentleness and patience, his incisive suggestions for editing. I only hope that I was able to learn enough from his example that I could apply something of his eye to these pages, and that I may one day, in exercising what he taught me since the time I looked up at him as a giant in the house, achieve a fraction of his wit and mastery of structure, qualities he so emphatically displayed in his genre-bending and often side-splittingly funny works of fiction, novels such as Black Flames (1997) and Memini (2003); the 2011 novella, Brain & Breakfast (one of my favorites!); and treasure troves of short stories, including The Final Dream & Other Fictions (1995), The Best Known Man in the World & Other Misfits (2001), and A Giant in the House & Other Excesses (2011)—all ideal introductions to his impressive range. The many short stories he contributed to anthologies are also well worth your while to track down.

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I:    Directing Events

CHAPTER 1:  The Privilege of Submission

CHAPTER 2:  The Four Faces of Togetherness

CHAPTER 3:  Assembly Lines and Conveyor Belts

PART II:  Selling Items

CHAPTER 4:  The Right Amount of Choice

CHAPTER 5:  Secrets

CHAPTER 6:  Dinner in Pictures

CHAPTER 7:  Defining Mediums

CHAPTER 8:  Choice Words

CHAPTER 9:  Write Prices

CHAPTER 10:  Selective Selling

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix A

Appendix B

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

I’M WRITING A BOOK ABOUT RESTAURANT MENUS. COULD I ASK YOU some questions about the design of your menus? I blurted, seizing the chance after dinner on the way out to meet Sarintip Singsanong, a.k.a Jazz, then co-owner and front-of-the-house maestro of Jitlada. Cheerfully checking on guests in the two small, but full, dining rooms, the practiced host had not stopped moving.

I knew I wouldn’t throw her. Jazz was used to inquiring writers. Jitlada’s accolades for best Thai in Los Angeles, blessings by critic Jonathan Gold, and more articles about the place were hard to miss under the glass tops of the dining-room tables and in the otherwise modest front window. Part of a Colman Andrews feature in Gourmet was the About text for the restaurant on its website.

Jazz beamed and immediately steered me outside to meet her (now late) brother (also co-owner at the time) Suthiporn Sungkamee, or Chef Tui. It was 11:00 p.m., just after the dinner rush, and Chef Tui sat in a chair looking out over the strip-mall parking lot on a Thai Town slice of Sunset Boulevard. He was still aproned but taking a well-earned respite. Jazz insisted, He’s the man to speak to about the menu.

Did the chef design the menu pages? I wondered, not sure Jazz understood. I traced a rectangle in the air with my fingers to specify what I called "the design of the physical menu." No matter. They both began speaking with passion about Jitlada’s food.

Who could blame them for thinking that, by menu, I meant food? The word menu is ambiguous, after all. It can refer to the dishes on a bill of fare, not the artifact itself. What’s more, Jazz and Chef Tui were justifiably proud of their cuisine, honed by the chef’s more than fifty years of experience. Finally, judging by their media coverage, Jazz and Chef Tui weren’t used to fielding questions about the art of menu design.

And yet, their nine-page document—which overflowed, by the way, onto a glow-in-the-dark board with another list of handwritten specials—was part of what made Jitlada exceptional. The menu was notoriously long. That night I counted 252 items just on the main menu. I’ve seen longer lists in Chinese restaurants, but Jitlada’s was a contender even among those. It was long enough to have inspired—indirectly, at least—a feature in the Los Angeles Times. In 2011, food blogger Jo Stougaard made news by challenging herself to eat every dish on the list.

Furthermore, the menu looked—if not graphically hip or crafted by professional menu consultants—methodical. The prices, for example, were all expressed as X.95, whether a dish was $5.95 or $64.95. The listing for Crying Tiger, a dish so-named because your choice of beef or pork would be eye-watering if you poured on too much of the accompanying chili sauce, mentioned that the dish was featured on Food Network’s Best Thing I Ever Ate show. Also, the listings were selectively redundant. Several dishes from the main menu repeated on a list that stood on the table in a clear plastic stand—a table tent, in industry parlance. It didn’t seem random, either, that the word spicy in the phrase spicy smoothies was the only one in bright red. Collectively, these features showed at least a little thought and definitely a conviction that how a menu communicates matters.

A few days later, I clarified what I was after and Jazz generously answered questions about the physical menu. But she and Chef Tui would not be the only restaurateurs with whom I had the same miscommunication at first.

Without meaning to, restaurant critics make such misunderstandings more likely. How often have you read a review that seriously discussed the artistry of the menu? Readers want to learn about the food, the service, the setting, and the overall dining experience, so they can decide if they want to patronize a place. Reviewers seldom have the space to elaborate, as I shall in this book, how the menu, like an operating manual, is the thing that coordinates them all.

I didn’t always analyze menus. For decades as a restaurant diner, I related to them mainly on emotional and personal terms.

On a rare trip with my mother and stepfather to Europe as a teen in 1985, I began collecting menus from restaurants that stirred my imagination. My mother’s clippings from Gourmet ensured us a succession of impressive restaurant outings, and the permanence of menus compensated in part for those fleeting meals.

I already had a fondness for restaurants. My mother and stepfather’s habit of trying new places with me in tow in San Francisco, where I lived most of the year, gave dining out an air of aesthetic adventure. So did the exposure my stepmother and father gave me in the summer to diners, roadhouses, Sun Valley surf and turf, and old New England taverns and chowder institutions over the years they lived in Idaho and Rhode Island. Establishments they brought me to on sojourns to Manhattan after their move east also amazed me. My stepmother planned our escapades in culinary culture high, low, and ethnically eye-opening. We’d go from the bohemian El Faro in Greenwich Village (now closed), where dusky murals of flamenco dancers had held on to memories of smoke-filled nights since 1927, to the dapper (and also no more) Le Train Bleu, the signature restaurant in Bloomingdale’s designed to look like a first-class railroad dining car.

Throughout my teens and early twenties, I saved restaurant menus diaristically and sporadically. But early in my professional life, my perspective on menus and habits of collecting them changed. After earning my doctorate in art history and landing a job as assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, I earned just enough to patronize some modish spots. I started keeping tabs on restaurant trends as much as art-world fads. Art history trained me to see aesthetics as conduits of cultural values and social relations, so I saw restaurant style increasingly through that lens. Because the menus I encountered encapsulated the aesthetics of their restaurants, collecting them allowed me to chronicle restaurant fashions I found significant. Most of my Chicago specimens epitomize late-nineties penchants for multicultural fusion and creative takes on comfort foods.

Not until the first decade of the 2000s did I make restaurant design, including the artistry of menus, the focus of my professional work. Then, I was back in academia and one of the few art historians writing about restaurant aesthetics. As a result, my menu-collecting habits changed again. To do research for my first book on restaurants, Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America, I didn’t visit a single restaurant in my new hometown of LA, or in Washington, DC; New York City; Chicago; Napa Valley; or the San Francisco Bay Area without asking for a menu. My recordkeeping got equally systematic. I took pictures of all the dishes I ordered and made digital files that cross-referenced menu descriptions. In a passage of my book, I wrote about menus for the first time.

For Smart Casual, I considered menu design as evidence of social history: shifts in menu style signaled the changing values of restaurant producers and consumers. My entire collection of menus to that point, even what I’d saved before my art-historical consciousness, now served as more than a dining-out diary. It testified to my book’s conclusions about American culture.

A discussion of menus as sales tools didn’t belong in Smart Casual, but my research on restaurants, during and after its production, taught me more and more about this aspect of menus. From reading about the industry and conversations I had with restaurateurs, I realized the profound contribution a menu makes to a restaurant’s success—or failure. The menu impacts everything from operations and profits to diner experience and behavior. Behind the scenes, the contents, size, and scope of a menu determine a restaurant’s needs for and uses of space, equipment, and labor. The alignment between menu and resources decides a restaurant’s fate. For example, if a menu lists mostly grilled items, yet the kitchen devotes minimal space and staff to the grill while maintaining a relatively large dining room, reducing the number of grilled items on the menu could avert financial disaster. Meanwhile, a menu also determines a lot of public relations. Because it does most of the work of communicating what a place sells, business success depends mightily on the menu’s ability to make those offerings attractive.

This recognition of a menu’s vital role changed how I thought about restaurants. But it wasn’t the only thing that drove me to write a book about menus. The final catalyst was the cognitive dissonance I felt knowing that menu design is crucial for restaurant success while also thinking that, beyond the occasional enticing picture or noticeably sensuous dish description, I had never sensed that my consumer choices were swayed by a menu’s design. For most of my encounters with a bill of fare, I felt as if I had determined my craving for a particular dish on the list, I had decided whether or not to start with an appetizer, and so on.

The question hounded me: Was I truly unmoved by menus’ efforts to sell me, or was I simply unaware of their influence? Once again, my training as an art historian guided me. From it I knew that lack of awareness of an object’s power to persuade is no gauge of its persuasiveness. On the contrary, its impact may be all the greater for it. A message can become naturalized—that is, seen as inevitable or obvious—when its form becomes so familiar and integrated into routines (like dining out) that we no longer perceive its arbitrariness and artificiality. In the case of a menu, naturalization would mean that the choices a menu presents seem to be as we expect them and what we wanted all along. With the possibility of naturalization in mind, I resolved to find out if and how menus steer consumer satisfaction and choice.

To be sure, this book makes the persuasiveness of menus a central concern. But it encompasses more than just the diner’s perspective. I start with the premise that a menu’s main function is to broker the interests of restaurateurs and us diners. A successful menu convinces us we like the choices we find while ensuring (by influencing our choices) the restaurateur a profitable and smoothly running business. Thus, my ultimate goal in this book is to reveal what makes menus effective as mediators of the restaurateur-diner relationship. To the restaurant as an enterprise, nothing is more vital than the health of this social bond. The two parties involved might be individual or aggregate. By restaurateur, I mean not necessarily one person but everyone who, together, decides the character of their establishment. Likewise, I think of diner as anyone or all who hold sway in the dining party.

Like all people, restaurateurs and diners carry complex and varied motives, but we can generalize about where each party stands vis-à-vis the other. For example, unless diners go to a place unwilling, we can assume a high degree of accord—after all, picky eaters are unlikely to choose a restaurant that offers only a surprise prix fixe menu. But, even when diners and restaurateurs share interest in a type of experience, the potential for discord lurks.

Restaurateurs bring to the table distinct motives that can interfere with ours. We don’t worry as they do about profit margins on items, attracting and keeping talented staff, turning tables, or whether the offerings take logistical and financial advantage of constraints in funding, staffing, equipment, space, buying ingredients, or the law. Concerns like these require that restaurants limit our freedom of choice in how we dine, for how long, and what we buy for how much. Such limits can conflict with desires unique to us—such as getting the best value, staying as long as we want, receiving the utmost hospitality, and having what we think is enough choice.

A good overall business model minimizes tension on multiple fronts, and the menu is often paramount to the task: it attempts to influence our desires and choices—even our contentment with those choices.

A menu works hard before, during, and after a restaurant visit. Our first contact with one—in a case near a doorway, through a window and above a counter, or on a mobile screen—often occurs before we commit to dining somewhere. A menu then signals whether or not the restaurant is our kind. Must we order family style? Are we comfortable with the foreign words? How much is a main course? What the menu says filters the public for sympathetic people, determining whether or not we patronize the restaurant in the first place.

At that point, it also sets expectations, which affect our dining satisfaction in the end. The promises a menu makes about its offerings—typically in images or words—can dictate how gratified we are by our eventual selections and, by extension, the chances we come back. So, at least for the sake of repeat business and good word of mouth, a menu must be careful what it makes us wish for. A menu sours us on a place if it overpromises. Conversely, it can calculate pleasant surprise.

When we’re on the premises and considering what to order, a menu nudges us in more ways. By how it sequences courses, or organizes and names the item headings, a menu attempts to direct the event of our meal. With statements of rules (No substitutions, please), it may even try to modify our behavior in minutiae.

Not the least of a menu’s jobs once we cross the commercial threshold is to sell us items, including the restaurant as a whole. The latter task doesn’t end at the physical or virtual doorway. Once we’re inside a restaurant and searching the menu for items we want, verbal and visual features get another look. Then, the menu can reinforce (or undermine) the scenario that unfolds as we dine. In that way, the menu helps us judge the credibility of the brand and, in some cases, the entertainment value of the restaurant. Also on closer inspection, the material qualities of a menu—beginning with its cleanliness—affect our impressions of quality. Finally, at every point of purchase, a menu uses verbal and visual devices to make individual items attractive.

In turn, in all stages of our restaurant encounter, from our resolve to visit through each decision point in the meal, we use a menu to gauge where and to what extent we have room to negotiate for the variations we want on the restaurant’s offerings and rules.

You may have noticed that, in the effort to elicit our cooperation and satisfaction, menus rarely work alone. They partner with other features of the restaurant’s mis-en-scène. Consider the servers. Menus come to life in the hands of waitstaff, who may orient us to them upon arriving at our table, point to parts of the menu not to be missed, and make recommendations: The cheesecake here is to die for! Servers are a menu’s wingmen. When reciting specials or answering questions about how a dish is prepared, they’re also its missing pages.

Menus conspire, too, with seductive features of décor. At upscale-casual eateries, we might find a wall of wine bottles or a romantic view of the rotisserie—sure signs the menu sells wine and slow-roasted meats. Any salad bar is always its own menu-within-the-main-menu. At fast-food outlets, the windows display posters reproducing their TV and social-media ads. These, with furniture-sized photos of hamburgers or tacos, are menu megaphones. Have you seen the colorful collection of plastic food samples in the shop windows of Japanese restaurants? They’re captivating and informative, lures for the printed menus inside. In cafeterias or buffet restaurants, the dishes themselves, tempting in trays, contribute to the sales pitch of the menu.

Some menu supplements do more menu-like work—informing, appetizing, entertaining, and steering customers—than the written menus of the same establishments. At A’Float Sushi, a busy place in Old Town Pasadena, California, there’s a printed menu, but the real attraction is the center of the restaurant, where diners sit around a large boat-shaped station of sushi chefs and a conveyor belt on which the chefs continually deposit dishes. The items rotate, passing within arm’s reach of diners charged by the number and colors of plates they take. The last time I ate at A’Float, I barely glanced at a printed menu.

At The Gardens of Taxco, a Mexican haunt in West Hollywood, all dinner options (from its opening in 1971 until 2016, when it closed to change location and concept) were sing-sung by the waiters.

The spoken menu has an infamous past. Students of American history remember the unexpected civil rights hero Booker Wright, a black waiter at Lucso’s restaurant in Mississippi who startled everyone in 1965 when he told NBC News about his treatment by the white customers. Before speaking out in a way that cost him his job and, some say, his life, he demonstrated for the camera the rapid-fire recitation of the menu—there’s no written menu, he said—that was Wright’s routine shtick.

Although we can’t be sure they’re as old as restaurants themselves (which archaeologists date back to ancient Greece), or even as old as written menus (the earliest of which was discovered on the wall of a bar in second-century-BCE Pompeii), we do know that restaurant-menu supplements and alternate forms have existed for a remarkably long time. The first evidence I found was in Sung Dynasty (960–1279) China, principally during the Southern Sung (1127–1279) period. Some large restaurants frequented by prosperous merchants had, in addition to written menus, so-called viewing dishes. As soon as guests were seated, waiters would bring to their tables prepared examples of items from which the customers selected. They promptly swapped out the viewing dishes for ones the guests could eat. More than one contemporary chronicler described this menu-like practice, if only to point out that the less sophisticated diners who began eating from the viewing dishes were mocked.

The multiplicity of menu forms, today as in the past, begs the question: What is a restaurant menu? I found no definition broad enough to encompass the likes of server recitations and displays of real food. I propose this: A restaurant menu is a communication of the establishment’s offerings. In most cases, the offerings are presented as options from which the diner may choose. I say most because there’s one exception, increasingly prevalent in recent decades in gourmet places: the set tasting menu, which I discuss in chapter 1.

When I began my research for this book, the question of how menus influence consumer choice had already received a great deal of attention. Since the 1920s, a deep reserve of English-language manuals on menu design for would-be restaurateurs had amassed. Journalists sometimes repeated their dicta, spreading them further into popular consciousness.

But I questioned their advice. The literature teemed with bold, yet rarely supported, directives for designing profitable menus. Although they sometimes disagreed, the manuals all recommended specific tactics, from where to place high-margin items on a page to sell more of them to how to write dish descriptions and prices. Advising restaurateurs to place items they want to sell most where the diner looks first, and then claiming the diner looks first at the upper-right portion of a vertical-fold two-panel menu, is just one example of the manuals’ penchant for promulgating concrete and rigid design principles.

Because they’re some of the few books with menu design in the title, they were the first I read. But, as I did, I grew skeptical. My own experience as a diner contradicted not just particular points, which I take up in subsequent chapters, but also their general implication that people perceive and use menus in uniform and predictable ways. At my most disillusioned, I questioned their fundamental premise—that menus influence us, period.

I thought about my visits to restaurants, especially fast-food places, with Jamisin, my significant other. We process information on a signboard and make a selection as if we’re two different species. In less than a minute, Jamisin figures out the optimal combination of items he likes that get him the best deal. On occasion, he even outsmarts the restaurant, recognizing that two separately listed dishes add up to something less expensive than an advertised combo with similar contents, or that the addition of one à la carte side dish to a bundle is a better deal than a running promotion. Meanwhile, especially if I’m new to the place, I get overwhelmed by the cacophony of colors, pictures, and scripts. It takes me a couple of minutes to catch on, if I ever do, to the intended information hierarchy, and sometimes I don’t read the menu in any of the orderly schemes claimed by the menu manuals. Because I’m impatient when I’m hungry, I feel pressured easily in a queue, and I don’t frequent fast-food places often enough to get used to the style of their menus, I tend to hunt quickly for something I know I like and just go with that. That’s when Jamisin, always looking out for me, tells me there’s a better version of what I want in a section of the board I didn’t see.

This recurring scenario showed me how variously people perceive and respond to menus. It certainly cast doubt on universalizing declarations by experts about what techniques of menu design work. Recognizing the discrepancy between my experience and the experts’ statements, I also knew that, to properly examine what makes menus persuasive, I needed to refer to personal experience for at least one source of truth.

That’s one reason I dined at more than sixty different restaurants (listed in Appendix A, see page 209) and documented my experience of the menus in each case. I generated the list based on every menu type I could conceive, a list that encompassed all of the characteristics that my review of the popular and scientific literature (and a few hunches of my own) convinced me were the most consequential to menu design.

My list included concepts that were single- and multi-unit; chains regional, national, and international; eateries of varying ethnicities and cultural fusions; kid-friendly and catering to the elderly; vanguard and traditional; historic and new; full-service, half-service, and self-service; with set tasting menus and with food choice; specialized and catchall; casual and formal; more and less themed; and for differing times of day. To avoid trying just places fitting my personal taste, I made sure to go to many restaurants I had to steel myself to visit. In the process, I was careful to ensure that my sample ranged widely across neighborhoods. I wanted my restaurant sample to represent the broadest possible range of menu styles. I hoped that, through encounters with a gamut of types, I would increase my chances of noticing facets of menu design and their impact previously ignored.

Because I decided to consider such a vast spectrum of menu examples—what’s more, at my own expense and in the gaps of university teaching—I had to be pragmatic. I confined my restaurant outings to my home base of LA and surrounding municipalities. Occasionally, I share my experiences of menus elsewhere, especially where there’s no local equivalent or I had a noteworthy firsthand experience. Inevitably, I draw as well on my own menu memory bank—the cabinet-sized menu collection I accumulated over decades. But my main focus is on the menu experiences I had with this book in mind.

Thankfully, my reliance on the LA region isn’t too compromising. The extraordinary ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic breadth of its residents and tourists as well as the range of restaurants seeking their business make the LA environs a valid locus for studying menus of the widest variety.

Owing to special circumstances, such as a fascinating menu change during my research period, or to differing conditions, such as the presence of a drive-thru menu in addition to an in-store, I visited a few places more than once. At each location, I made sure to document and, if allowed, collect all menus for that meal service. I noted their physical placement in the restaurant as well as their verbal and visual design. I observed how servers and features of the dining room aided menus by highlighting or recommending certain items or introducing or reintroducing menus to the table throughout a meal. To determine what expectations menus created—and what promises they did or didn’t fulfill—I also documented how pictures and descriptions of items compared with the dishes served.

To supplement firsthand documentation of menus in restaurants,