Menu Mind Control

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Yeah, it's interesting.

In the very early days, well, this is sort of the first day we were getting ready to go out, and I'd never run a restaurant before, which became really obvious at this last moment.

And my chef, Rolando, he was working with me, but he was still a professor at Johnson Wales.

So he was just coming up like one or two days a week.

And I was responsible for getting everything in place.

And he came and he's like, Eric, he's like, where's the menu?

And I was like, oh,

we had no menu on the truck.

We had no place for a menu.

We just, I hadn't considered it.

Like, I got all the kitchen equipment in there.

We got everything perfect, except there was no menu.

No menu?

A restaurant with no menu?

What was Air thinking?

That's Air Muir.

And in 2008, he set up a food truck without a menu.

And eventually it would go on to become one of Boston's most popular fast-casual restaurant chains called Clover.

We serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and our prices tend to be pretty low.

Our food is pretty quick.

We make everything from scratch in-house every day.

There's no freezers and we even make our own barbecue sauce.

Which is, like everything else at Clover, delicious.

I wish there was a Clover in LA.

I do love Clover, and my partner Tim works right near one at his office downtown, and he's downloaded the menu app for even easier, faster ordering.

Air did eventually figure out a menu, and today with their app, Clover is at the cutting edge of menu tech.

And that is why we're talking to Air, because this episode is all about menus.

You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And we have a lot of questions about the history and science of menus.

Like, when was the first menu invented and what did people do before that?

And something I've wondered, and maybe some of you have too, are menus manipulating us?

If there's a dish in one particular place on the menu, or if the prices of the dishes are listed in a certain way, can that push us to choose something we might not otherwise have wanted to eat?

Menu mind control.

Is it a real thing?

Because it's not just about prices and positioning.

What about how things are described, or even how many dishes to include on a menu?

There's so many design decisions that go into creating a menu.

And this episode, we're going to decode them.

All that, plus the menus of the future.

But one thing that is not in this episode because we didn't have room is the story of secret menus.

You know, the famous animal style at In-N-Out and other secrets too secret to say out loud.

But don't all start crying because we've saved that story for our special supporters newsletter, and you can get that by donating $5 an episode on Patreon or $9 a month on our website.

Secret menus and the warm glove of supporting your favorite indie podcasters can't be beat.

In the archaeological record for written menus, there is a menu written on the wall of a bar in the second century BCE in Pompeii.

Allison Perlman is the author of the book, May We Suggest Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion.

And she says that's the earliest example of a written menu we've found so far.

But as long as there have been people wanting to eat outside their house, there have been places to do that.

And those places will have needed some kind of menu, even if it was just a list written on the wall.

Sometimes though, the menu wasn't actually written.

Allison said about 900 years ago during the Southern Song dynasty in China, they had a custom called viewing dishes, and this was like a visual menu.

The servers would bring out these dishes, sort of sample dishes, and as soon as the diners had selected, then they would swap them for actual dishes that the diners could eat.

So there's always some sort of communication of the offerings.

This kind of visual menu is still something you can find today, especially in Japan and in Japanese restaurants.

There's a whole tradition of making very beautiful wooden or today plastic models of each dish, and you look at them to choose what to eat.

But written menus didn't become really common until restaurants as we know them today were invented.

We actually made an episode about this.

It's called Unsurprisingly Inventing the Restaurant and that really started the menu trend too.

First menus are from the 1700s in Paris and then I believe the first menu in the United States was like 1830s, I think 1834.

So they are modern inventions.

Josh Kuhn is director of the USC Annenberg School of Communication.

and we met with him in the special collections room of the Los Angeles Public Library, where they have an enormous enormous and delightful menu collection.

Josh actually wrote a whole book about it called To Live and Dine in LA.

In the early days in the U.S., menus were mostly not printed on

paper, but were just written on chalkboards and were something that could be seen by everybody in the restaurant at the same time.

Josh told us that individual written menus became more common in the late 1800s, and even then they were an expensive thing to print.

And so menus were usually only printed for people who were sitting down to a very fancy meal.

So 1875, first menu the library has in LA from this annual feast and ball, which was held downtown, actually, at a vineyard owned by Don Matteo Keller, who was actually an Irishman, Matthew Keller, and he

owned quite a bit of land that is now the land we know of as Malibu, and was a very, very, very wealthy became a very wealthy person in Los Angeles history.

The menu at this annual ball held by Don Matteo, aka Matthew, included such delights as mock turtle soup and oyster patties, plus every other kind of roasted meat you can imagine.

And it's not atypical of early menus, at least in Los Angeles from the late 1800s, in that they weren't linked to restaurants.

They were linked to events.

Because dining out,

and especially dining out in such a way that you would have a menu, was such an act of extreme privilege.

Nowadays, of course, personal printed menus have trickled down to the rest of us, although the list on the wall is still a popular option, especially at the lower end of the market.

So over history, a menu has been a list of what an event or a restaurant has to offer over the course of the meal.

Philosophically, a menu is lots of other things.

A menu is a story.

A menu is marketing, advertising.

It's a biography of the chef.

It's the first interface, really, between a customer.

and the chef.

And I could go on.

It's many things.

Well, the point of any menu is to reconcile the interests of restaurateurs and diners.

They are not always on the same page.

The menus are peacekeepers, they're relationship brokers, in a sense.

Allison and Josh are authors, so of course they have this literary meta-view of what a menu is.

But what about people who run restaurants and design menus for a living?

What did they think a menu is?

We asked some people with just that experience.

Tom Schlesinger Guidelli has been in the business since he was about 10 years old, and last year he opened his own place, a cool new restaurant in Boston, called Alcove.

I wanted it to be a place where you could come and have a hamburger on a snowy Tuesday in February and a beer, and it would be 20 bucks.

And when you wanted to celebrate your anniversary, you would feel comfortable coming here as well.

And if you just want some delicious little snacks and a cocktail at the bar before hopping on an evening train, like Cynthia and I did one Thursday afternoon, well, it's perfect for that too.

We met Tom at Alcove with his menu designer Drew Katz and we asked them what they think a menu is.

It's a snapshot in time of what that restaurant's offering is.

I think also it's a roadmap for what's to come.

I mean, even the way it's laid out and the progression of the meal sets expectations, but there's a certain amount of, I don't know if it's adrenaline, but when you sit at a restaurant and you finally get to your table and you open it up, there's that like exhilarating feeling of like, what am I gonna have?

There's all these choices, all these amazing options, and it becomes a sort of, you start to plan out your evening centered around what's in front of you.

So a menu is everything from a roadmap to a story, which is lovely, but still ultimately a restaurant is trying to sell sell you some food.

And the menu is a big part of how they do that.

Menu has to persuade us, diners, that what they offer is what we want.

And that's not always so easy.

And especially because they have to limit our freedom of choice.

Persuade us.

This is just what Allison wanted to figure out.

How are menus trying to persuade us?

And is it working?

To find out, Allison embarked on a pretty tasty, but also pretty rigorous field study.

And that was me going to 60 restaurant brands, 77 visits, and documenting very systematically each time.

Allison also read manuals about menu design.

She interviewed chefs and designers and owners.

She looked through all the scientific studies she could find on menus and persuasion.

So, with all that research under her belt, are there any secret rules about what works?

Like the universal guidelines of menu design?

Okay, there are very few.

One of them, though, is actually the law, meaning it has to be accurate.

There are accuracy laws.

So that's one thing.

Rule number one, accuracy in labeling.

Allison says, the only other real universal, it's not a law, but she says it's something every restaurant should live by, the menus should be clean.

So far, so basic.

Accurate and clean.

But what about all the other millions of choices a restaurateur and their designer have to make about font and layout and paper choice and pricing and everything?

Aren't there right and wrong decisions there?

Okay, let's start with price.

That seems like a pretty big one.

Obviously, restaurant owners want us to spend our money and there are some tools that help there.

One thing that is certainly not recommended and for good reason is putting prices in order.

So the idea that you should stagger your prices is a good idea if you want people to not to shop by price.

This seems to be generally good advice.

And actually if you start paying attention to the menus when you go out to eat, you'll notice that basically everyone does this.

I can't remember any time I've seen a menu where the prices are in order of cheapest to most expensive.

Not a great idea.

Allison says if you want to stop people from focusing on the price, you can also sort of tuck the prices at the end of the menu description rather than having them all lined up in a column.

Or you can leave off the dollar sign or even write the number as a word.

All of these help with not drawing your attention to the price.

Now if you're a menu designer or a restaurateur and you want to convince people that something is a good deal and worth opening their wallet for, Allison Ellison says you do have another trick.

Behavioral economists call it anchor pricing.

An anchor price is just the idea of having something super expensive on your menu, so everything else looks pretty reasonable compared.

So, for example, there was a restaurant I went to, a modern steakhouse called Cut, and they had an item on the menu for true Japanese 100% Wagyu beef from Miyazaki Prefecture, Kiyushu, and it was the ribeye version that you could get eight ounces of ribeye for $155.

That was a kind of anchor price because it made the New York sirloin on the very same menu look like a bargain at $57.

Behavioral economists have shown that this does work, that we're more likely to spend more money on something than we otherwise might have if there's something even more expensive to compare it to.

But Allison says the menu experts she interviewed were not convinced that anchor pricing is that useful for them, even if it works.

Some swear by it, but some say it's wasteful.

That super expensive item is taking up valuable menu space, and if it's not being ordered, then it is literally going to waste.

What about Alcove?

We asked Tom about when he and Drew were designing the menu if they thought about including a dish that was kind of an anchor price.

Yeah, we thought that we weren't going to do that.

I mean, truthfully, like, I don't think that's an appropriate way to get people to come back to your restaurant.

Tom's point was that tricking people into overspending isn't exactly going to leave them happy, and if they're not happy, they're not coming back.

I mean I have a philosophy that everybody has an inner wallet when they come into a restaurant.

They have an idea of what they want to spend and that it's the responsibility of the restaurant to help them spend what they want to spend.

Whatever that may be.

Whether that's they want to come in and spend 20 bucks tonight or they want to ball out and spend $1,000 tonight.

Whatever that is, it's the responsibility of the restaurant to help them experience that.

Air works in a different pricing environment.

If you go to a fast casual restaurant like Clover, you expect to spend, I don't know, maybe $10, bucks, 15 max.

Anchor pricing isn't what's working in fast casual because those restaurants have a different trick.

If you look over the last 10, 15 years, most of the improvements in sales, most of the major players are coming from basket, not from price.

So what that means is they're successful in getting people to buy more things or to trade up for more expensive things.

You know, a simple version of this is like having guacamole be an add-on.

Or if you go into like a bowl place or a salad place, you know, they'll have $7.90 listed on their menu.

But when you go and check out, it's like $13.

And that process is like a psychological arbitrage that they're playing.

If the menu actually said $13,

that would put people off.

But somehow, seeing $7.99 on the menu and paying $13 at the register doesn't.

So that idea that you don't mind that guac as an add-on, but you do mind it if it's in the initial price.

I don't know why that is, but that is the way people are.

So this add-on trick does get people to spend more money, though Air doesn't use the strategy at Clover.

Air's pricing is straightforward because like Tom, his goal is happy, loyal customers.

Still, if you see anchor pricing or add-ons, yes, the person who wrote that menu is trying to get you to spend more money.

Whether or not that pays off for the restaurant in the long term is kind of an open question.

And a lot depends on the restaurant itself.

Because actually, what the price is really doing is telling you something about the restaurant itself.

More than convincing you, the prices are a way of saying, are you in a fast food joint where something might cost $1.99, or are you at a 15-course tasting menu where the price might be tucked away at the bottom of the menu?

And certainly there is no 0.99 cents.

But back to manipulation, because related to this idea of anchor prices tricking you into spending more is the idea that you can sell more of a certain dish if you put it in just the right spot on your menu.

So is there any truth to that?

There are many claims in the literature that there are sweet sweet spots on menus, most of which are not based solidly in any science.

The only experiment that I found that seemed rigorous enough was a study that was done a long time ago in 1980 of a signboard menu in a fast food restaurant.

This wasn't even about a menu you'd get at a table, it was about a menu on the wall.

In the study, the researchers examined ten locations of a fast food restaurant that were all set up basically the same way.

You came in on the right, got in line, looked up at the menu, and the researchers alternated where different menu items were displayed over the course of the study.

And they found that most of the time in most of the stores,

the upper right was the best-selling spot.

I can't explain that.

The researchers theorized it might have to do with the entrance to the restaurant being on the right because other results have not been as clear-cut.

In her book, Allison lists loads of studies that have been done to try to find the sweet spot on a menu.

Some studies have shown that the items at the beginning and the end of a list did best.

Some find that it was the stuff in the middle that was most popular.

There were even eye-tracking studies done to see where people looked on a menu, but the studies weren't done in a real-world restaurant.

Basically, none of the studies Allison could find on the topic were conclusive.

If there is a sweet spot, we haven't found it yet.

Okay, but here's a way I feel like menus are definitely manipulating me.

Maybe it's just because I'm a writer myself, but I feel like I am a total sucker for how dishes are described.

Tell me a little story about the ingredients, and my hand is reaching for my wallet quicker than you can say.

Heirloom lilac colored beans discovered growing in a single village in Guerrero.

Well, Allison says that type of description can actually be useful in selling more of a particular dish, depending on who your audience is.

I admit I too am in the heirloom lilac colored bean target audience, yes.

Allison said research has been done on how effective descriptive language actually is.

So on a menu, a non-descriptive label would be, say, chicken, but a descriptive one.

Well, for example, you could have a

geographic evocative label like Iowa pork chops.

You could have a brand related, like you know, Oreo shake.

Or you could have a like a nostalgic or a kind of emotional sort of label like grandma's cookies.

Or you know, you could have a sensory label which is also descriptive like crispy tender chicken or something like this.

Researchers at the University of Illinois actually studied the impact of precisely these descriptors at a campus cafeteria back in 2001 and they found that they all increased sales by as much as 27%.

Not only that, the people who chose the more descriptively described foods felt happier with their purchases too.

So it seems like great, everyone should use these types of descriptions, right?

Well of course it's not quite quite that straightforward.

Like everything else so far involving menus, it really depends.

A sensory label like crispy tender chicken might work really well in a place like Applebee's.

Their menus are super descriptive.

They may be like two sentences long in some cases that are just describing everything about not only what the dish looks like, what it tastes like, how it's going to be served and plated.

It's almost like the verbal equivalent of a photograph.

Seriously, here's Applebee's brew pub pretzels and beer beer cheese dip.

The perfect balance of crunchy and chewy, warm pretzel sticks are ready to dip in Blue Moon, trademark, white cheddar beer cheese, and honey Dijon mustard.

Not much left to the imagination there.

Like Allison says, it's practically a photograph.

But that type of description wouldn't work at Alcove in Boston.

Tom is not a fan of adjectives.

Like crispy or fried or delicious,

you know, or bombastic fries.

I don't know.

You know, you see menus that have these kind of, let's just go with superlatives.

It doesn't mean a ton to me.

It's not, it doesn't translate or help me understand what the dish is better.

In a place like Tom's restaurant, or even a higher-end one, you're much more likely to get a stripped-down description.

Something more along the lines of what Allison calls kama cuisine.

The sort of like haiku style, um,

poetic, enigmatic, like chicken.

It's not just chicken, it's going to be, you know, nori, togarashi, corn.

You know, you want to.

It's beet poetry happening.

And the mystery of that is important in that situation because the diners want an adventure.

They want to be surprised.

Allison even showed us some super, super high-end menus that go beyond comic cuisine into basically a riddle.

There's poetry and then there's poetry.

This is a tasting menu and it's minimal, minimal, minimal.

Foie gras wants to be corn.

Foie gras wants to be corn?

I literally have no clue what in the world is going on there.

But it'll probably cost you an arm and a leg, and I'm sure it's utterly delicious.

Although, I don't actually like foie gras, but I can't even tell from that description whether it is foie gras or it's actually corn or something else altogether.

Who knows?

So that's obviously an extreme.

And it was an outlier in the menus that Allison collected and analyzed.

But the minimal comma cuisine in high-end restaurants, that is common.

And Josh says it's a relatively recent trend.

One of the things you see from the

80s to the present when we get kind of into the artisanal period, the farm-to-table period, the return to small farming and organic artisanal produce and approaches to cooking is that people don't want a lot of words on the menu because that goes against the very idea of what you're trying to do, which is that this is simple.

Josh says that common cuisine is also a reaction to adjective cuisine.

Because before the 80s, more adjectives was better, even in high-end places.

Most point to the over-adjective moment in not just LA, but U.S.

menu culture, to the kind of rise of the Restaurant Associates Corporation in the 50s, where menus started to get really wordy and dishes were nearly their own sentences.

Restaurant Associates was the group behind all the big restaurants in the 50s and 60s.

The Four Seasons, the Tavern on the Green, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, all the C and Be Seen places.

And they had dishes like roast prime rib of beef aged and cured under ultraviolet rays with cabaret potatoes and a wooden bowl of chiffonade salad.

The chiffonade is interesting.

It points to an even earlier trend.

Restaurateurs in the early 1900s used French to signal that you were out for a high-end meal.

Food scholars call it menu French.

You know, which is the idea that if you just throw a little bit of French, like, it's going to make your food taste better and make you a much better person.

Today, Josh says you're more likely to see menu Spanish than menu French on a high-end menu, at least in L.A.

LA.

That's because the foreign words on our menus, the ones we're supposed to be sophisticated enough to understand, they change over time.

And they're also different at different ends of the market.

Because now we find on the McDonald's menu, sriracha, what five years ago, six years ago, that would have been impossible to imagine.

So these things sort of filter and change.

So it's not as straightforward as that study in the college cafeteria made it seem.

Whether a particular menu language might convince you to buy something, it's going to depend on what restaurant you're in, what you expect from that restaurant, and even what decade it is.

Maybe even what month of the year it is.

Yeah.

Sasha Alger, who was at the time the head chef, co-owner of Mudhen Tavern, which is a sort of like food savvy, but also sort of sports bar vibe.

kind of restaurant.

And she was incredibly savvy about menu language and was always experimenting with how the labeling of her dishes affected the sales of the dishes.

For instance, Sasha had a dish on the menu she called Vietnamese corn, and the dish wasn't selling particularly well.

So she tried renaming it to wheat harvest corn, and then she put a descriptive line underneath that that said had lemongrass in it so that people would know that it had a sort of an Asian flavor to it.

And that did better.

It did better.

But she thought she could do better than that.

And realizing that the summer was coming, she decided to rename it again, Summertime Corn.

And when she did that, it just was a bestseller.

So this was her own experiment, really,

showing, first of all, the power, not only the power of the descriptive label, but also

her understanding of her audience and the...

the timing, the context of the season.

So yes, menus are a little bit manipulative, but is that the main thing restaurant owners are trying to do?

Is their primary goal when they're designing their menu to get you to spend more money after you sit down at the table?

We asked Tom and Drew what their process was.

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I would say we started the physical menus close to a year in advance of the restaurant.

Tommy was amazing.

He collects menus and steals them, which he probably shouldn't be telling other people, but he'll go to restaurants and he basically came into our office with stacks of menus and we were able to say, oh, well, you really like this from this menu.

We don't like this in this menu.

Alcove opened about a year ago.

and about a year before that, Tom and Drew started talking menu design.

And actually, one of the first choices they made was nothing to do with sweet spots or language or how to write the prices.

It was about what material to print it on.

So we went with a linen paper because it was softer and it really just adds texture.

So we wanted something that was a little higher end and higher quality.

This sounds nice, lovely linen paper that feels kind of like high-end stationery.

But isn't that a little impractical?

How long does something like that last?

Depends on the service.

And the customers.

Brunch, as you can imagine, gets a little bit more of a beating.

Lunch does really well.

We're a little more of a business crowd for lunch.

But

these can last a week or two,

depending on the use.

I mean, they don't lack durability.

They're also not meant to last because you change the menu items frequently.

Like a lot of high-end seasonally driven places today, Alcove's menu changes all the time to reflect what's best at the market.

But that means reprinting all the time, and that was a huge headache for Drew, the designer.

So, as a designer, it's much easier to say, okay, well, here's your design.

It's static, it's not going to change.

Let's print 10,000 of them and be done.

Instead of a perfectly designed menu with all the dishes aligned just so, Drew had to create a template where Tom could print whatever he wanted whenever he wanted to change the menu.

And Drew had no control over the things designers obsess over, like whether the spaces between each dish listing was exactly the same.

And that was was a huge challenge for us.

A huge challenge, but also a relatively new challenge.

Because until home computing and home printers became a thing in the 80s, restaurants wouldn't have been able to switch up their menus and print a new one on demand.

Mid-century, you're looking at menus that really weren't changing a lot.

They were very big menus, packed with stuff, and for the most part, they weren't changing.

And actually, Allison says that the gigantic, unchanging menu, it's not just a matter of printing technology.

That style was actually popular 40, 50 years ago.

The fine dining menu used to be really, really long.

In the United States, for example, if you read the great restaurateur Impresario Sirio Macchione's autobiography, he talks about how he was very proud that in 1974 he had these 55 choices on his fine dining menu and then other specials that he would give.

And he was very proud of this as something that was a service to the guests and that they had all these choices.

And that was part of being a service-oriented fine-dining restaurant.

Josh showed us a 1954 menu from Musso and Franks, which is a famous LA restaurant where Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles and all the Hollywood elite used to go.

The cardstock it was printed on was already oversized, and then the print was tiny and filled the entire page.

There were even extra things crammed in the margins.

What does this say to you that we have Welsh rarebit, hot cakes, Irish bacon, Mexican tamale, pork chop suey,

Cape Cod on the half shell.

I mean there's a...

Says you're in LA in the 20th century.

You know, that you can get chow mein and chopped suey and chicken fried rice and chili concarne and Welsh rare bit on the same menu.

The tradition would be the more things you have on a menu, the better the restaurant.

Because you can, your chef is so good that

the kitchen can produce all of these dishes.

But today, a higher-end restaurant is probably not going to offer a menu with 50 to 100 options on it.

Now, I think most people, when they see a menu that this big, think something's wrong here.

Where are they getting all this food?

And is it fresh?

And how long has it been in the kitchen?

And where was it shipped from?

We expect of a fine dining restaurant to be a much more focused menu, something that's coming from the chef as autour.

And it's very different expectations.

So, for someone opening a high-end restaurant today, like Tom was a year ago, what's the right number of dishes on a menu now?

For whom, you know, I think that's part of the question, right?

There's a reason why when you go to a 40-seat restaurant, they're offering eight items.

Some of it's space in the kitchen, some of it's waste.

There's a reason why when you go to a cheesecake factory, the menu is, let's go, dozens of pages and many different cuisine types.

But you're also looking at kitchens in a restaurant like that, which is four or five hundred seats.

One fry later is dedicated to French fries.

One fry later is dedicated to pot stickers.

One salad person is dedicated to the Asian chop salad in a restaurant like that.

At Alcove, they have maybe five to seven options in most sections.

The snack section, the one to share, that's the biggest.

There are ten options there.

For me, we try to have something for everybody, but that doesn't mean we have everything for everybody all the time.

Tom's reality is that he can't have everything for everybody all of the time.

He doesn't have a Cheesecake Factory-style kitchen, so he can't serve a Cheesecake Factory-length menu, even if he wanted to.

Which, fortunately, he doesn't.

Air's restaurants are even smaller than Alcove, And so he, too, has to balance the number of dishes he offers with the quality he wants them to be.

This is a constant tension for us because from a business standpoint, if I go from, like right now on my breakfast menu, I have four breakfast sandwiches.

If we add a fifth, we'll have more sales.

And if we add a sixth, we'll have even more sales yet.

So there's a strong desire, especially among like more operationally minded people in the company, like keep adding, you know, because you add this and you get more sales.

And you do.

You you know you serve a need that you didn't serve before you serve a person that you didn't serve before and so you do slowly grow the pie but at the same time

for food complexity is the absolute enemy of quality and so I think what we would do in time is back ourselves into a place where nothing tastes as good.

I mean to the point where like personally if I'm considering a restaurant to go eat at, I'll look at how big their menu is.

And if it's a big menu, I probably will favor a restaurant with a small menu.

And I think it's a strong signal about will the food taste good.

But again, it's all about the context.

Clover and Alcove are the kinds of places where you're expected to trust that you'll find almost all the dishes delicious, so the menu can be shorter.

And their food is good because they focus on only what they can do well within their constraints.

But maybe you're getting a big group together, and you need to go to the type of place that has a little bit of something for everyone.

There are plenty of restaurants like that, and they have the kitchens to match, so their menus can be long, and they are.

At Alcove, when it came to the physical design of the menu, what Drew and Tom came up with is beautiful.

It's blue and gold, it's very classy, there are elements of the logo embossed on the paper, it's a soft linen, and Tom and his team print new ones regularly as they change the offerings.

But at Clover, Air can change his menu every second because it's digital.

And actually, the brave new world of digital menus is what's finally giving restaurateurs and menu designers the data they need to see what really works in terms of menu engineering.

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The potential there and what is already happening in many cases is pretty extraordinary.

In the past decade, technology has started to make significant inroads into the menu biz.

Tablets at the table, digital menu boards on the wall, apps on your phone.

Digital menus started at fast food restaurants but increasingly even high-end places are using them because they offer restaurateurs a couple of really important advantages.

One thing that they allow you to do that you don't get with the usual printed style menu or usual signboard style menu is controlling a sequence.

Restaurant owners are basically forcing eaters to go through a series of screens.

They have to pay at least some attention to the options that they're scrolling through.

That allows the restaurateur to focus the attention of the diner on very specific information.

The other huge advantage with digital is the harnessing of data and being able to suggestively sell to your customers.

Restaurateurs can see what people have ordered before and adjust what they see accordingly.

They can see what people who order one dish tend to also order and use that information to make suggestions.

And they can look at all that data to figure out what's actually working.

They know exactly what people saw and exactly what they ended up ordering.

There has an entire digital menu at Clover, and we wanted to see it in person.

So we met him at breakfast time at one of his restaurants in Cambridge, and we were staring up at the large, colorful screen that took up nearly the length of the wall.

It's changed, yeah.

The

picture came up.

Picture came up.

That's the popover breakfast sandwich, which is really yummy.

And I usually have this personally every Friday morning.

It's like, I do this like once a week at the end of my week.

I have like a coffee and a pop-over breakfast sandwich and enjoy it.

Listeners, Cynthia was totally manipulated by this menu board and went on to order the pop-over breakfast sandwich, just so you know.

I did.

It was delicious.

I was okay being manipulated.

And a popover, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, is essentially what I would call a Yorkshire pudding.

And that is totally not helpful for most Americans.

It's a kind of muffin-sized puff made from a really light batter.

It's a little crispy on the outside and really airy inside and great to fill up with something else like what you might find in a breakfast sandwich.

But let's not get distracted.

The point is the menu.

Air's shiny new digital menu, which is a very long way from how Clover started out.

Without any menu at all.

That was when Air was launching his first food truck near MIT.

When the chef was like, we need a menu, Air grabbed a nearby whiteboard.

And I just rode on the side of it and then wiped it off.

For a long time, Air stuck with the whiteboard system.

He built an app that allowed servers to take orders digitally, but the menu was literally handwritten until he opened his first brick-and-mortar restaurant in Harvard Square in 2010.

Now, Air has gotten rid of all the Clover food trucks, and instead they have a whole local chain of meat-free, fast-casual restaurants around Cambridge and Boston.

And all the menus are now digital, all with technology designed in-house.

They're not just digital, they're actually 100% live.

So a lot of the digital menus in our industry right now, if you go to Dunkin' Donuts, for example, even Starbucks has digital menus at some of the restaurants now.

Those are sort of akin to a PDF or an image file or maybe even like a video file with Lily animations.

But if they want to make a change on the menu, they have to send it back to an art team who like redoes the menu and then publishes it for them.

Our menu is

we've done a lot of things with the tech to allow it to be entirely live.

So when an item is removed, it goes out.

When a new one's added, it comes right onto the menu.

One of the main reasons Air needs this flexibility with his menu isn't anything to do with gathering data or figuring out how to sell more of item X.

It's because he changes his menu so frequently.

Air might swap out like 10% of the menu even on just one day, but this happens every day.

And so month to month, almost the entire menu might have switched at least once, if not more.

So we have some things that are there all the time, but we have a whole lot of motion, a lot of new things coming in, and the schedules for those are driven by what's available from farmers.

Clover serves produce that is in season and produce that is almost all local.

And produce isn't in season locally for very long at a time.

You might just get a couple, three weeks of strawberries and a month of Brussels sprouts.

Perhaps surprisingly to some of you listeners, Clover's Brussels Sprout Sandwich is one of their absolute bestsellers.

But it's only around for a few weeks.

So when the Brussels Sprout Sandwich runs out, Air might have to update the menu with a new option right in the middle of the lunchtime rush.

And that relies on technology.

The way we build our menu and the way we source source could not have been done 15 years ago even.

Certainly not 20 years ago.

There would just have not been, there would not have been a way to do it in any practical sense.

Sourcing is what drove AIR to build this cutting-edge dynamic digital menu, but it's not the only way it's turned out to be useful.

So right now at Clover on our menus and our restaurants, we have all word descriptions, very simplified word descriptions.

But what Air calls very simplified word descriptions can be really confusing.

Like right now they have a sandwich called a Thanksgiving mushroom.

That's all the menu says.

That is not creating a clear picture in my mind, but that's okay because the menu is actually supposed to start a conversation.

We have a role in the restaurant called Clover Guides and those people are dedicated to walking people through the menu.

Air sees these clover guides as playing almost an equal role to the menu on the wall.

He and his team designed a high-tech menu, but it also relies on a person interacting with the technology.

There is another thing that is peculiar to Clover, which is that Air really wants his customers to try something new.

He sources all kinds of local fruit and vegetables that aren't on the menu in a lot of other fast casual type places, and he knows oftentimes people are sort of wary of trying something new.

So imagine a customer comes in and they see something called a carrot sandwich on the menu and they can't picture what that is.

So they ask the Clover guide.

When you ask,

what is a carrot sandwich?

The Clover guide pushes a little button and then in one of the screens that is right behind them shows a giant, beautiful photograph of that sandwich with a little story and some brief nutritional information about that sandwich and some allergens about it.

And what happens, which is really neat, and most of our restaurants get very busy at lunchtime.

And so, one person will be having that conversation about the carrot sandwich, and it'll be on one of these screens, but everybody else in line gets to see it.

We saw this happen in front of our eyes.

The menu screen was just the menu.

Then, a woman asked the clover guide a question about the pop-over sandwich, and all of a sudden, a gigantic photo of the pop-over sandwich appeared on the screen and the clover guide said this.

So we make our popovers from scratch.

It's kind of similar to a croissant and so we take that, we slice it in half, we serve it warm with some just mayo, a slice of cheddar cheese, a layer of sliced tomatoes, warm tempeh, and then crispy fried leeks on top.

I don't know if the woman asking the question ordered the popover sandwich, but as you already know, I certainly did.

I'd never tried that sandwich before and I've been leaning towards different ones.

So Air and his digital menu and the Clover Guide, they succeeded.

They got you to try something new.

But Air isn't done playing with technology.

He released a new app recently, and he says by the end of the year, 30% of their orders will come through the app.

But he still wants to get everyone to try something new.

So, how will that work if they're not talking to a Clover guide who can explain the dish as they pull up a beautiful photo on the screen?

We're building into it a bunch of logic that looks at customers' behavior and then gives them little encouragements to try the things.

So, for example, if we look at somebody and they come for lunch lunch four times a month on average, but they've never come for breakfast, we may drop a free breakfast in their cart, like totally on us.

Or it might notice that you're always getting the chickpea fritter sandwich every time you come, and we may give you a discount to try a different sandwich.

So it's cool.

The app can actually, in a different way, do some of the same things that we've been doing in person.

The whole ordering experience at Clover is kind of like a giant ongoing experiment.

Air recently added a thing to the menu boards where you could see how quickly the last order of each item was ready for people in a rush.

And you could see how many people had liked each of the items on the app.

It's a fun thing.

We're sort of playing with how that works and how it influences behavior.

It may be really powerful at some point.

And I think figuring out how those various social dynamics and other things work would be great.

Maybe we can use some of the same psychological forces that Instagram and others have figured out for positive.

Obviously, companies can and will use this type of data to just, you know, get us all all to eat more fast food pizza.

In general, there's a lot of potentially manipulative power in these new digital menus, but at least Air's trying to use it to get us all to enjoy more vegetables.

You know, we're still learning from it.

I do think that we know that when those items are featured in various ways, they do sell better.

So there's some effect, and I don't think we know at this point sort of the optimal way, you know, to do it.

But we certainly can take an item that may be a little bit obscure in the menu and we can highlight it and bring a lot more attention to it it, and a lot more people try it.

Talking with Air makes me realize that menus in the future are probably going to be able to manipulate us pretty effectively.

Actually, much more effectively than they do right now.

After talking to Allison, it seems like printed menus today are not these perfectly honed manipulation tools.

Sure, there are a few tricks that work, but they only work in certain contexts, and they might not even be a good idea.

There are almost no hard, fast rules.

And anyway, if there's one thing all our experts agree on, it's that menus are totally context-specific.

Like the question of the number of dishes.

The Cheesecake Factory can and probably should offer a zillion different dishes.

Toma Alcove might only have 20.

And Allison told us there's a restaurant in Koreatown in LA that has exactly two things on the menu, and it's super successful.

Because there are so many other Korean restaurants around it, that restaurant can specialize.

It's the same thing for every decision.

Some restaurants, it makes sense to highlight prices, some it makes sense to not call attention to them.

Some like Air use photos.

Some like Tom would die before putting a photo on their menu.

So what the design of a menu really does is tell you something about the type of restaurant you're in.

But it also tells stories about trends over time.

Menu French nearly 100 years ago, comma cuisine this century.

Josh used the menu collection at the LA Public Library to tell the story of the city of LA.

So while it turns out that menus can't really tell us what to do, they can tell us something.

And they're also just fascinating and beautiful.

Allison and Josh and Tom, they could hardly wait to show us their favorite menus.

Menus they thought were amazing, even though they weren't necessarily effective.

Oh, you know what you should see?

Just

because you should see this.

I brought this.

This is my historical collection.

TGI Friday menu from 1976.

No way.

Yeah.

Look at it.

Look at this.

What?

Look at this.

Yeah.

Look at that.

It looks nothing.

This would never.

You wouldn't even read that.

This would never happen today.

This menu was ridiculous.

We have photos on the website.

It was printed in an elementary school notebook and it was covered in doodles and gold stars and little jokes.

And it was printed in something that looked like handwritten cursive.

It was nearly impossible to read, but it was totally delightful.

It was one of my favorites as an art object.

But I can't imagine sitting down at a restaurant and getting this and having to decide what to eat.

Oh my gosh.

So this is a, I have a menu from The Stinking Rose, which is on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles.

And inside this, it's a beautifully illustrated, very imaginatively, charmingly illustrated menu.

And at the top, inside, at the top, is an illustration and description for a dish called the banya calda, described as garlic soaking in a hot tub.

And the illustration is little garlic clove buddies, little friends in the shape of garlic cloves, that are toasting with wine glass

in a hot tub.

And it is charming.

It's very, it's just adorable.

At the LA Public Library, it was the same thing.

Josh showed us this absurd salad bowl-shaped menu and another health food one with potassium broth from the early 1900s.

And there were ones that looked like oil paintings and other gorgeous Art Deco menus and even modern art by famous artists like David Hockney.

You can see the images in Josh's book.

We have links on our website.

And the public library is digitizing them and adding the images to their website too.

In a way, they are throwaway on the one hand, but on the other,

in some cases, there's so much care that's put into them in terms not just of the language and the writing, but the design of them that they become art objects and they become kind of everyday, free art objects that one can just take with you.

And they're beautiful objects.

I have to say, I have a whole new appreciation for menus now.

I look at them not suspiciously anymore, but curiously.

Like, why did they make all these particular design decisions and what can those choices tell me?

It's the same for Allison.

I actually notice the categories now.

I will look at a menu and actually try to notice every category.

I never did that before.

And has it improved the whole experience?

No.

There's no improvement of the experience.

It was always good.

I always loved restaurants, which is why I started this in the first place.

It certainly hasn't changed that, but it's just made me more aware of

what I think they're trying to say or trying to show me.

Our big question coming into this episode was, are menus manipulating us?

And that was also Allison's big question when she started her book.

So where'd she end up?

It doesn't seem like a big, horrible conspiracy because we are ourselves, I think, very willing co-conspirators in the whole persuasive process.

We go out wanting to be persuaded.

So this is in most cases a friendly manipulation.

When things go wrong, when the food doesn't live up to the description, or it doesn't look like the photo, or the menu is stained and dirty, but you're in a fancy place, that's when you notice the gap between the promise in the menu and the reality.

And you're unhappy and you feel manipulated.

But that's not how most of us experience menus, because if we did, we'd stop going to restaurants entirely.

It's amazing that things work as well as they do, that we feel so happy about this relationship.

But that's the magic of the menu: that it is actually, when it's working,

it's making that seem seamless.

It's making it seem that both parties are happy.

It's making both parties work and function together as a relationship.

Thanks this episode to Allison Perlman.

Her new book is called May We Suggest: Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion, and we have a link on our website.

Thanks also to Josh Kuhn, author of To Live and Dine in LA, Menus and the Making of the Modern City.

The book is crammed full of photos of the hundreds of menus in the LA Public Library's menu collection, and all proceeds support the library.

Thanks also to Sochit Oliva, who is the senior librarian in charge of special collections, and listener Bob Timmerman, who works at the library and connected us.

And huge thanks to Air Muir of Clover and Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli of Alcove and designer Drew Katz for letting us peek behind the scenes of their process.

Don't forget, if you want to hear all about secret menus, what they are, how chefs use them, what you can order at Clover that Air doesn't really want you to, you can sign up for our special supporters newsletter by donating at least nine bucks a month on our website, gastropod.com, or $5 an episode on Patreon.

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That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

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