THIS WEEK'S MENU

Digital menu board at Neri's Restaurant, Koreatown, Los Angeles. Photo by Jamisin Matthews.

Digital menu boards have been slower to launch in the United States than in Europe or Asia. It's unclear to me exactly why. Perhaps there's a cultural dimension relating to differences in taste. Perhaps it has to do with business structures and startup costs. Dear readers, what do you think?

The matter is complicated by the fact that digital systems can vary greatly in capabilities and cost. Some are just TV screens showing a digital file of a static menu. The menu changes only when you revise the digital file. If you go with this cheaper option, you'll get the up-to-date look of a digital menu. But you'll sacrifice some of the fancy dynamics you can get with systems for which you'll pay high startup costs and monthly maintenance fees. These might include moving or rotating images; real-time variable pricing, whereby prices change throughout the day in response to ebbs and flows in consumer demand; and the capacity to change offerings and promotions as often as the weather or current events. As you might guess, the most complex systems are more likely to be adopted by large chain restaurants. They have the budgets to start and sustain them and the impetus to vary menu contents and prices by hour and region.

http://www.alisonpearlman.com

THIS WEEK'S MENU

Cake Monkey, bakery, Los Angeles, 12-31-16

To pick up some mini-cakes for a New Year's Eve celebration, I stopped into Cake Monkey. The bakery is as full of menus--above the counter, on the counter--as it is the sweets they advertise.

As a merchandising effort, this one impressed me the most. The full mini-cake lineup had a heart-warming esprit de corps. Even more savvy was the partnership forged between the cross-sectioned cakes and their corresponding labels.

They are ideal complementaries. Look, for example, at the Black and White Cakewich. The verbal description informs you that "Chocolate Crunchy Pearls" are included. I never would have guessed from a view of the sliced cake itself. Meanwhile, there is nothing in the label that conveyed the cake's moist texture and deep color or the mid-line position and satisfying thickness of that buttercream slab.

Bravi, and Happy New Year, Cake Monkey design team!

http://www.alisonpearlman.com

INTRODUCING "THIS WEEK'S MENU"

The presentation clinches the deal here, doesn't it? To my eye, it's a stunner. At the very least, can you admit this Spicy Chocolate Cake with Avocado Cream, cradled in a green glass that shows off the item's vertical layers and hypes the avocado hue, is an artful effort?

All menus are presentations designed to entice--like this palmed offer from a dessert cart at the now (sadly) closed Rivera restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, like the cart it came from, and like the restaurant housing the cart.

With this post, I present something hopefully appealing to you. It's the start of a new blog series for The Eye in Dining. Under the title This Week's Menu, I'll bring you brief annotations on noteworthy features of restaurant menus I've encountered. I hope it gives you a sense of menus' rhetorical wiles.

Like restaurants themselves, some succeed; others fail. But how they do either is not always "by the book." (There are countless books on restaurant menu design.) As people say, it's complicated.

Alison Pearlman
http://www.alisonpearlman.com