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Psychology of food menu design

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Re: Psychology of food menu design

#51

Post by davidpelayo »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #41
userbinator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pictures would have to be extremely large for that to be useful, or each item very distinctive, since otherwise a lot of food tends to look like "blob of stuff on a dish". I think listing the ingredients would be far more helpful to understand what you're getting. ...and the obligatory "items may not be exactly as shown" disclaimer would make pictures not reliable for portion sizes either.

Everyone has phones now. Ideally the menu would have a QR code that pops open the menu in your browser. All the items could be hyperlinks that show those huge pictures. That would be lovely.

That's exactly what we are starting in https://lomenu.com with examples of QR linking to menus like this demo one: https://demo1.lomenu.com/lagramola.

We just need to gather as many menus as possible from all over the world. Currently Spain -Barcelona focused so far.

Re: Psychology of food menu design

#52

Post by davidpelayo »

So now imagine you could see menus of restaurants before hand. With plenty of details of it. Translated to many languages, if you may. Because, for tourists on certain places, sometimes, it's difficult to get the meaning of what they are about to eat.

Put all this data indexed on a platform focused on menus and, you have https://www.lomenu.com.

What are your thoughts on this? Currently it's focused only to Spain, because the fact of gathering such an amount of digital information, and then transcript it to a indexable format to be useful on searches, it's a big amount of work.

Would you think people running restaurants are willing to update their menus or daily menus in a daily/week basis?

Re: Psychology of food menu design

#53

Post by puranjay »

davidpelayo wrote: post #52

So now imagine you could see menus of restaurants before hand. With plenty of details of it. Translated to many languages, if you may. Because, for tourists on certain places, sometimes, it's difficult to get the meaning of what they are about to eat. Put all this data indexed on a platform focused on menus and, you have https://www.lomenu.com . What are your thoughts on this? Currently it's focused only to Spain, be…

There's already Zomato.com. Massive collection of menus, at least for restaurants in India. They acquired UrbanSpoon so they might have menus for US restaurants too.

Re: Psychology of food menu design

#54

Post by davidpelayo »

puranjay wrote: post #53
davidpelayo wrote: post #52

So now imagine you could see menus of restaurants before hand. With plenty of details of it. Translated to many languages, if you may. Because, for tourists on certain places, sometimes, it's difficult to get the meaning of what they are about to eat. Put all this data indexed on a platform focused on menus and, you have https://www.lomenu.com . What are your thoughts on this? Currently it's focused only to Spain, be…

There's already Zomato.com. Massive collection of menus, at least for restaurants in India. They acquired UrbanSpoon so they might have menus for US restaurants too.

But think about it as a dynamic entity. Something that evolves over time. Because all restaurants change their menu at least twice a year.

Zomato tends to list dishes of a menu, giving the whole importance to the restaurant information. Isn't a contradiction menus don't get the deserved attention when it comes to compare what restaurant you want to choose?

What's the best way then to spread menus up to date all over the world? I believe there is a need for one. A centralized cloud platform gathering all menus together, giving the importance menus deserve. Good designed, multilanguage and currency and so on. What do you think?

Re: Psychology of food menu design

#55

Post by natecavanaugh »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #13

I prefer places that have only a few items on the menu. I especially like restaurants which only have one menu item, and focus on making that one dish the best it can be. Too many menu options just causes anxiety and analysis paralysis. If you go to a fancy restaurant like the French Laundry, they only have a prix fixe menu with several courses (usually at least 5). You get what you get (although they usually have su…

One of my favorite restaurants in the world, bar none, is in Olinda, Brazi, Casa de Noca[1]. You get to it through a network of tight cobblestone streets on hills, then walk through what appears to be a house, that somehow leads you out back to a large open air patio that has tables and chairs, and monkeys will sometimes run around the walls.

But their menu [2] is by far the most Apple-like experience I've ever gotten from a restaurant. They only offer 1 dish [3], which is 3 ingredients, and only in 3 different sizes. The components are those delicious blocks of cheese on top, carne de Sol (sun cured beef), and macaxiera (a potato like root).

And it's basically just big, bigger, biggest. And it's amazing, both in what they execute, but how easy the entire experience is.

To me, it's just cool to see restaurants, on both ends of the social status scale, pull off amazing food with a dedication to keeping things simple.

If you're ever in Recife or Olinda, I highly recommend it :)

[1] https://m.yelp.com/biz/casa-de-noca-olinda

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2ns7jioa1fao96/Photo%20Sep%2009%2...

[3] https://www.dropbox.com/s/1urjle4gv8z0hh8/Photo%20Sep%2009%2...

Re: Psychology of food menu design

#56

Post by puranjay »

davidpelayo wrote: post #54
puranjay wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already Zomato.com. Massive collection of menus, at least for restaurants in India. They acquired UrbanSpoon so they might have menus for US restaurants too.

But think about it as a dynamic entity. Something that evolves over time. Because all restaurants change their menu at least twice a year. Zomato tends to list dishes of a menu, giving the whole importance to the restaurant information. Isn't a contradiction menus don't get the deserved attention when it comes to compare what restaurant you want to choose? What's the best way then to spread menus up to date all over…

I agree. The menus on Zomato are basically just scanned copies of restaurant menus

I would prefer a database of the city's restaurants and their menus, all sortable and searchable.

Say, I want to know restaurants serve Ramen near my home, I should be able to do that. I should also be able to sort them by price, or number of variants, etc.

The problem, of course, is data collection. If there is substantial traffic, restaurants have an incentive to keep information updated themselves.

Else, you're going to have to rely on crowdsourced information with some OCR

Re: Psychology of food menu design

#57

Post by unkown-unknowns »

davidpelayo wrote: post #51
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has phones now. Ideally the menu would have a QR code that pops open the menu in your browser. All the items could be hyperlinks that show those huge pictures. That would be lovely.

That's exactly what we are starting in https://lomenu.com with examples of QR linking to menus like this demo one: https://demo1.lomenu.com/lagramola . We just need to gather as many menus as possible from all over the world. Currently Spain -Barcelona focused so far.

No pictures in your menu though.

Re: Psychology of food menu design

#58

Post by drdeadringer »

dguo wrote: post #28

I wish every menu would come with pictures for every item, if only because portion sizes are so unpredictable. Yelp has pictures sometimes, but they're crowdsourced, so it's usually only the popular items that have them. Maybe the cost of getting good pictures and making longer menus is a factor. Or maybe it's just another part of the "psychology of food menu design."

I am reminded of the scene from "Lost In Translation" where both main characters are comparing two menu-pictured dishes. It's remarked "they look exactly the same, what's the difference?". Comedy aside, similar might happen.

I do still find this a good idea.

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