Home

Your party of four enters a favorite restaurant. You're with friends you haven't seen for a while. An efficient greeter greets you, leads you to a table, and hands each of you a menu. You settle in your seats and look over the choices expectantly.

The menu may be a single sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve or a multi-page hardcover book. But no matter the size or shape, you hold in your eager hands more than a mere list of food offerings -- you're holding a devilishly clever sales tool. Take as evidence an article in a restaurant industry magazine that says we should not imagine that we restaurant customers decide on our own what to order; instead, the menu tells us what the restaurant wants us to buy.

You mean... Yes! We're being manipulated! There are people out there called menu engineers! And menu designers! Menu psychologists! Menu consultants! All at work to make us abandon what we thought we wanted to order and have us select the restaurant's most profitable items.

How do they get us to do this? According to a recent N.Y. Times article, "... there is a growing body of research into the science of menu pricing and writing, hoping the way to a diner's heart is not through the stomach, but through the unconscious."

I have a hard enough time with restaurant prices these days -- Eight bucks for a garden salad? -- without knowing that menu psychologists are, for a start, tinkering with the way those prices are presented to us on the page. For instance, there is frequently no dollar sign after the item, just a number. Apparently, $23 is scarier than simply 23. And prices must not be lined up vertically at the right hand of the page, because then we are more likely to scan down the column of prices to find one in our comfort zone, and then look to the left. No -- they advise that prices should come right after the description of the items, so we are encouraged to first choose and fall in love with an entree, with all its glorious adjectives, and only then find and accept the price.

Also, that "choice" may not be entirely our own. There is a power position in the menu: the inside right page, above the center. That is typically where we look first and where high profit items are located. Other subliminal "buy me" messages in the menu are delivered with type sizes, fonts, colors, pictures, boxes, position on the pages, shading, and the endless item descriptions, which can be up to 10(!) words long, according to one menu advisor.

But with all that, the restaurant's planning may be undone by the server and the mandatory Attack of the Killer Specials!

"Hi, I'm Eric. I'll be your server tonight. Would you like to hear the chef's specials?"

"Please," we say, and listen expectantly as Eric reads from the back of his order pad (or, if he's really good, fires them off from memory). "Our appetizer tonight is a farm-fresh Portobello mushroom, with roasted red pepper, vine-ripened tomato, fresh mozzarella, basil...." He starts reading slowly, but when he reaches the soup -- "sweet Vidalia onions sauteed with beef broth, topped with croutons and melted gruyere cheese" -- he unconsciously begins to accelerate, and as he hits the first of the seven entrees, "pan-seared breast of veal with prosciutto, eggplant, fresh tomato, mozzarella, and the chef's chutney," he is racing along with this blizzard of nouns and adjectives at maybe 400 words per minute.

He finally finishes. We stare at him. Why couldn't they just have a menu insert or a blackboard listing the specials? Or one of those little stand-up table signs? "Excuse me," I say, "what was that roasted thing? And how much is it?" Note that this question establishes me in Eric's mind as not only a bit slow, but also, well, cheap. And probably holding a discount coupon.

Patiently, he accommodates my dullness. "Which 'roasted thing' is that, sir?"

"It was somewhere between the pasta and the veal."

He describes the roasted thing again and gives me the price. This drives me back to the regular menu where I find a roasted thing priced more to my liking. I order the house wine; he's not surprised. In the end, because we now understand that we're being sold, handled, and manipulated by the menu wizards, we can see through or around the engineering, order what we really want, and enjoy our dinner out with friends.

And one final thing -- the menu must never, ever be sticky.

Bernard Jacks is a freelance humor writer who lives in Marlboro. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications.