Book Release: MAY WE SUGGEST: RESTAURANT MENUS AND THE ART OF PERSUASION

 

Years in the making, it has finally arrived! 

Get yours at your favorite book store or directly via this link: 

https://tinyurl.com/ydz3cyyr

 

We find restaurant menus everywhere. But we know little about how they work. In May We Suggest, I investigate how they try (and sometimes fail) to influence what we buy, how we dine, and how we feel about both. 

In 77 visits to 60 restaurant brands of all types throughout the greater Los Angeles area, I asked: How does a menu’s size, structure, imagery, language, materials, and pricing dictate what we buy or how we compose a meal? Does a fine-dining table menu try to hook us the same way as a signboard over a fast-food counter or a mobile-ordering app? What convinces us that one menu has enough choice and another too much or not enough? Along the way, I show how menus of differing styles operate. I also uncover what rhetoric works when, where, and why. 

You will not find a book about restaurant menus quite like this. I define restaurant menus in an expansive way, considering spoken variants, displays of real food, and digital varieties--not just sheets of paper and signboards. My study draws on an unprecedented range of disciplines, from experience design to behavioral economics. It is also the first book about restaurant menus to explore how, in their efforts to persuade us, menus seldom act alone. I show how they cooperate with restaurant décor, service, and other merchandising devices. 

Dear reader, if you are a restaurant-goer, a restaurateur, or a student of either, join me to find out how it is that, while we order from menus, menus try to order us. Anyone interested in the workings of restaurants, the experience of dining out, the rhetoric of things, and the subject of consumer choice will find the read enlightening and even amusing.

Copyright 2018 Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.

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PARDON ME WHILE I STUDY THE MENU

Salt's Cure, Los Angeles. Chalkboard menu of April 12, 2014. Photo J. Matthews.

Those of you who have been with this blog since I started it in 2009 know that, from time to time, I've commented on the design of restaurant menus. It was a post entitled "Menu Minimalism" (1-10-09), in fact--a cultural interpretation of the syntactical habit so many gourmet menus then had (and still have) of describing dishes by lists of principal ingredients with only commas between them--that launched The Eye in Dining. Since then, I've penned a couple of commentaries on menus. I didn't plan it this way, but they both deal with questions of size ("Big Menu, Small Menu," posted 6-25-09, and the more recent "Sizing Up the Menu Size" of 7-20-12). 

Lately, things have gotten more serious between me and menus. The more I study restaurants, aesthetically and operationally, the more I see the key role they play. Menus are, after all, much more than lists. They are among the most powerful mediators of restaurant experience. I am now hard at work writing a book about their designs and functions.

My apologies in advance to readers of this blog as I devote the considerable time needed to produce this book. On The Eye in Dining, I hope to share, here and there, related musings and status reports as the project matures. These will take time. Pardon me while I study the menu….

SIZING UP THE MENU SIZE

JoAnn Stougaard, featured with Jitlada's dishes for article by Betty Hallock, "Food Blogger's Extreme Eating Challenge," Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2011. Photo by Anne Cusack.

From a variety of food media, I gather that the expansive restaurant menu arouses starkly opposing responses.

Admirers of the restaurant Jitlada, arguably the most celebrated Thai place in Los Angeles, gush on at least as much about the astonishing breadth of the menu as they do about the quality of the food it begets. In this case, the long menu is taken as a sign of ambition and skill. More astounding still, this wealth of offerings comes from a kitchen so small that the owners were compelled to put signs up in the restaurant warning diners that their food will take a while. Some, like the always-on-trend blogger JoAnn Stougaard, mylastbite.com, have declared a desire to try everything on Jitlada's menu as if to do so might garner a gourmet prize (see Betty Hallock, "Food Blogger's Extreme Eating Challenge," LA Times, January 27, 2011).

At the same time, short menus are all the rage at trendy restaurants born of creative chefs that the food bloggerati also seem to enjoy. Apart from the separate beer and wine lists at these places, a single page on fine stock presenting a smartly limited list is the preferred solution, giving the suave impression of judicious "focus."

The small menu also gets support from other quarters. Take, for example, Gordon Ramsay's BBC show Kitchen Nightmares. Time after time, Ramsay excoriates the failing restaurateur for clinging to his long menus. Ramsay gives us plenty of justification for his wrath, repeatedly revealing the myriad horrors lurking behind long menus. On his show, they are the most dubious of documents, shields hiding scoundrels--undeservedly proud restaurateurs and cowardly cooks keeping molding herbs in undated containers in back cupboards, trays of long forgotten fish, and other soggy hashes that await their turn to be ordered but never will so long as the menu is...so long. Ramsay invariably rescues these establishments by making over their menus into something a lot more manageable--meaning, brief. 

Based on the above, I'm going to guess that there's no one answer to the question of whether long menus are a good or bad sign. I imagine it might depend on the management skills of the kitchen, including the ability to buy one ingredient and generate at least ten distinct dishes from it. I suspect this kind of smart shopping might be the case with Jitlada. Giang Nan in the San Gabriel Valley is a personal favorite I like to think, based on the delicious results, belongs in this category. Examine the long menus of these establishments and you might notice plenty of repeating ingredients, used in seemingly endless combinations.

But a mystery remains. I appeal to the restaurant-kitchen savvy to answer this: Is there a reliable way for diners to tell (without a full-scale investigation of the back of the house) when a large menu is a good or bad sign?