You may assume that a menu is simply a list of a restaurant's current offerings and specials. You couldn't be more wrong. A menu is, rather, a carefully crafted and curated weapon in a psychological battle that you do not even know you are engaged in. From wine-appropriate music to authentic-sounding but meaningless foreign names, restaurateurs have many ways to persuade diners into ordering high-profit meals.
Research from Bournemouth University in the UK shows that most menus crowbar in far more dishes than people want to choose from. And when it comes to choosing food and drink, as an influential psychophysicist by the name of Howard Moskowitz once said: "The mind knows not what the tongue wants." For example, when asked what kind of coffee they like, most Americans will say: "a dark, rich, hearty roast". But actually, only 25% really want that. Most prefer weak, milky coffee. Judgement is clouded by aspiration, peer pressure and marketing messages. And this is where that menu you were just presented comes in.
A few years back, the author William Poundstone rather brilliantly annotated the menu from Balthazar in New York to reveal the marketing bells and whistles it uses to herd diners into parting with the maximum amount of cash. Professor Brian Wansink, author of Slim by Design, Mindless Eating Solutions to Every Day Life, has extensively researched menu psychology, or as he puts it, "menu engineering". "What ends up initially catching the eye," he says, "has an unfair advantage over anything a person sees later on." There's some debate about how people's eyes travel around menus, but Wansink reckons "we generally scan the menu in a z-shaped fashion starting at the top-left hand corner." Whatever the pattern, though, we're easily interrupted by items being placed in boxes, next to pictures or icons, bolded or in a different color.
Next time you are reading over a menu in your favorite eatery, here are five things to look for that are designed to influence your choice and get you to spend more.
1. Mouth Watering Graphics
Photographs and illustrations on a menu aren't just there to look pretty, they can also help drum up sales. According to the late Gregg Rapp, called the restaurant industry's original menu engineer, menu graphics act as visual cues that can help highlight which dishes the restaurant wants to sell most. Based on his research, he found that including a photo or image can raise the sale of the featured item as much as 30%.
2. Never Using Dollar Signs
This is especially common at fast food or smaller eateries. The absence of dollar signs on a menu isn't a mistake—it's actually a common menu engineering tactic that establishments use to help sell more food. Using dollar signs or including the word "dollar" on a menu causes the customer to focus on cost instead of food. Because of this, you may notice that many restaurants will include the price of the dish, without dollar signs, two spaces after the dish description in the same font and style. This is done to help draw less attention to how expensive the dishes are.
3. Flowery Details.
Ever read a menu and notice that instead of just simply listing out dish names a restaurant will include elaborate, detailed language for each? For instance, "spaghetti and meatballs" becomes "housemade pasta tossed in rustic tomato-garlic sauce, served with organic grass-fed thyme-infused meatballs." Restaurants not only do this to help the customer paint a mental picture of the dish but to also help distract them from how much they're spending. It's also believed that a more intricate description can help command a higher price.
4. Decoy Items
Most restaurants don't necessarily want you to order the most expensive entree on the menu. They want you to order the entree that they make the most money on. So they will commonly place a somewhat pricey item with a high-profit margin close to a noticeably more expensive item with a lower profit margin. By comparison, that makes the former option seem like a good deal and a responsible choice for diners. This practice is called "decoy pricing," and the wallet-busting item that effectively makes everything surrounding it seem like a better value is called "the anchor."
5. Nested Price Listing
We've all seen menus in which the prices are listed on the right-hand side, far away from the food choices. But when diners see this, it's all too easy to skim the prices, decide what they're comfortable spending, and then rule out any entrées above that number. With the prices shown right next to the item instead, diners are far more likely to consider all of their options and choose based on what sounds most delicious without consulting the price tag.
These are not even close to all the tricks that "menu engineers" have developed to coax you toward eating more and more expensively. If you want to read more about menu design and the psychology behind it, here is a place to get you started.
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