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At its most basic, a menu is simply a way for a restaurant to communicate its offerings and their prices to its customers. But perhaps even more important, says Alison Pearlman, the author of a new book on menus called May We Suggest, a menu has to convince diners that they want what the restaurant is selling. So how do menus do that—and are they somehow subconsciously manipulating our choices? Are there universal principles of effective menu design that savvy diners can identify and outsmart? Listen in this episode as we decode the history and science of the not-so-humble menu.For as long as there have been places to eat outside the house, there have been menus, in one form or another. For most of its history, however, the menu hasn’t been the individually printed document we think of when we hear the word today. According to Pearlman, the earliest menu we’ve found is a list written on the wall of a bar in Pompeii, dating back to the second century B.C. Menus have also often been communicated verbally, or even, during China’s Southern Song dynasty, in the form of special viewing dishes—sample dishes that servers would bring out for diners to choose among.

In the United States, the first printed bill of fare dates back to 1834. According to Josh Kun, who told Los Angeles’s history through the public library’s menu collection in his recent book, To Live and Dine in L.A, most early menus weren’t linked to restaurants, but rather to special events, as the high cost of printing individual menus made sense only for a banquet. (In Los Angeles, Kun added, the earliest menus were printed before the city’s first books.) Nowadays, printed menus have trickled down to the rest of us—and the shifts in their design over time reveal not just the changing economics of restaurant dining, but also trends in demographics, aesthetics, and values.

But what about menus as sales tools? Can menu design and language sway our choices as consumers? That’s exactly what Pearlman, an art historian and food lover, set out to discover by interviewing restaurateurs, visiting dozens of restaurants and analyzing their menus, and reading every book and study she could find on the science of menu engineering. To test Pearlman’s findings, we visited two restaurateurs with two very different menus: Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli, the owner of Alcove, a year-old fine-dining restaurant in Boston, and Ayr Muir, the CEO of a small chain of fast-casual restaurants called Clover. With their help, and with Pearlman’s and Kun’s research, we get to the bottom of menu design’s many mysteries. Is there such a thing as a sweet spot on the menu—and if so, where is it? Does anchor pricing, when a menu features one extremely expensive dish so that everything else looks like a bargain, actually work? And how is the rise of digital menu technology helping restaurateurs make menus more manipulative than ever before? Listen in now for all that—and a couple of garlic cloves in a hot tub.


This post appears courtesy of Gastropod.

Source: The Behavioral Economics of Restaurant Menus