Deep Thoughts on the Food Tech Revolution by Captain Obvious McClure

If I want the most efficient dining experience I'll order in or go to a fast food place.

I go to a restaurant for the UX: a date night, the atmosphere, getting out of the apartment, people watching, hanging with friends, etc.

Downtime is the point! It is supposed to take time. It gives me a relaxed period of time to talk with the people I'm with while drinking beer/wine and waiting for the food to arrive. To enjoy the experience.

Converting restaurants to a twitter/facebook 30-second attention span experience seems like a net negative de-evolution to me. I don't play with my phone while I'm at the table with other people - I think it's rude as hell - but Dave does that all the time I suppose.

Giving me a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am experience is not what I want. I don't have children or am in a giant hurry, but it sounds like that's where he's coming from. Perhaps that's a bigger section of the population than I expect.

But, there's a reason why McDonald's has pictures of food as the menu and Ruth's Chris doesn't.

edit: That said, I do wish restaurants had a better idea of who their "best" customers are and all that jazz. I just don't think dropping iPads at every table is the right way to go.

I can see some advantages in what the author says, but I don't think the tech industry is a particularly good metaphor - for example, suggesting high-quality pictures of food will convert better. I've not ever been involved in the business end of a restaurant, but I've eaten in a few, and I can't believe that "converting" people who are reading a menu into people who have chosen something is actually a big problem - 99.5% of customers surely manage that one way or another.

Similarly, I'm not sure that providing reviews is obviously a good thing for a restaurateur - they hardly want to show you negative reviews of their dishes, and if they only show the positive ones it's obviously useless. I sort of see what he means about people saying when things suck, but surely if the restaurant knows one of their dishes is crap they'd be better off fixing or removing it than showing it with poor reviews.

It's not merely efficiency, though--the reason that these types of ideas suck is that they only care about buy-in from customers. What the customer thinks would enhance their experience. What the customer thinks would be nice "too many choices oh noes!".

The fact is that for the true clients in the market (the restaurants), we need to look at what makes their lives easier. And over the course of centuries, we've figured out more or less how to optimally use humans to service diners.

Take the idea of perks for frequent diners--this functionality is already exposed in most bars and restaurants if the customer comes back frequently enough to be recognized by the wait staff, and if they aren't so damned obnoxious that the restaurant wants to get rid of them.

Electronic menus for a place with 20 tables could be an outlay of around 4-10K, assuming you need only one tablet per table (you won't) and that the tablets won't ever break (they will) and that the customers will appreciate the move (they may not) and that there is no backend integration (there should be). Or, the owner can spend half that (say, 5 grand) on an 2 additional servers at $2.13/hr (in Texas) and "rent" them for a split 40 hrs/wk and better service. That's just silly.

Taking the example of Tex-Mex food, the same basic palette of food in storage can be combined in many different ways to provide variety to the end user, all with little extra cost to the restaurant, and so why bother simplifying a menu? You needlessly increase the data entropy of the choices offered and in so doing force yourself to have to purchase more varied ingredients (bad) in order to provide fewer perceived menu items (also bad). It's just dumb.

The problem of too much choice, bad descriptions, or not remembering last food ordered is very strictly a diner issue, not a restaurant one. Solving it, despite the relatively large amount of work the restaurant would have to put forth, would result in little payback. The places where people spend enough per-plate to justify that outlay already have quality staff kept on specifically because they can keep track of that and give the high-touch to their select audience.

This really is a great example of somebody trying to use tech to solve problems that don't exist for people in an industry they don't understand.

Very true. At Per Se you order wine off a tablet, which works because a table tends to order 1 bottle at a time.