Put Your Restaurant Menus Online!!!
Review: Papa D'Amour by Dominique Ansel. Plus: Why you should try the BEC at Birdee and the pan piñita at Lulla's. And an essay on restaurant websites!
Please enjoy this free essay about restaurant menus. Scroll past the paywall for reviews of the city’s hottest new bakeries!
Think of these longer columns as mini-magazines; just keep scrolling until you find what you like. No need to read in full!
Please put your menus (with prices) online!
Well, it happened again.
I was researching a hot new restaurant for a review, and the website had just about everything. Hours of operation. Online ordering. A cute backstory. Even a link to purchase gift certificates. Everything you could possibly need. Except for one thing.
An actual menu.
I know what you’re going to say. What about the online ordering for takeout? Isn’t that a menu? Alas, the dine-in offerings were quite different. And so when I showed up for a sit-down meal, I realized that I’d have to choose from a bunch of dishes that I didn’t know much about, culturally or culinarily.
I could’ve used a little help.
Now, in the grand scheme of things this isn’t a huge deal. I googled some stuff and I ate quite well. This isn’t rocket science; this is dinner. But my general belief is that if you’re going to spend, like, 90 minutes waiting for a table — and that was the case for most patrons here — you’ll want to know what you’re waiting for. Or whether you’re going to spend $120 or $350.
This sort of thing is happening more and more these days.
Once upon a time, before the pandemic, my big gripe was restaurants not publishing their prices online; it was an effort to get folks to spend less time thinking about the transactional experience of dining out (What, that Champagne is marked up 300 percent?) and more time getting excited about all the tasty food and drinks. Of course, it was a policy geared toward the rich.
Well now, a small class of popular and sometimes well-financed restaurants aren’t putting their menus online at all. No dinner menus. No cocktail menus. No wine lists. They’re simply posting a bunch of food photos on social media sites.
Or on occasion, restaurants are even doing away with websites altogether, and making Instagram their chief home on the web.
I don’t like this.
Part of me appreciates the lack of online menus. A very small part of me.
Honestly, I don’t even like to watch movie trailers. I don’t need to see a spoiler-filled synopsis of an entire film three months before it comes out. And my overactive brain doesn’t like to imagine which unlucky bloke will get passed around like a blunt by a bunch of genetically modified T-Rexes before one of them slurps up that guy’s intestines like chilled udon.
This is all to say: There’s something to be said about the element of surprise when you’re in the theater, or at the chef’s counter — where the whole thing is supposed to be a performance. But chef’s counters and tasting menus are a different story.
My chief beef is with a la carte establishments, everyday venues. Places for a few small plates and a bottle of wine. Places where you’ll face a hefty wait to snag a table. I can think of 10 hip a la carte spots with no online menus.
There are surely more.
Let me explain what happens if there’s no menu on a restaurant website. I’m going to do precisely what the establishment wants me to do. I’m going to hop over to their Instagram, where I can puzzle together maybe two-thirds of the menu.
Here’s how that usually goes:
I open up a web browser on my desktop, and I try to click on a photo of a dish that looks good. Then, Insta tells me I need to log in. And I get 2-factored. Fail!
I open up Insta on my phone. I start to put in the restaurant’s handle, but then I notice someone is pinging my Insta DMs. I take care of that.
Before I get to the restaurant’s Insta page, I see that the California influencer who “teaches” me Chilean Spanish has a new haircut.
I notice that Raye is eating Korean food in Seoul, and I daydream about the celebrity life for a minute, and about her room service order.
I forget what restaurant I was looking for in the first place.
So that’s that. But sometimes the opposite happens. I get bombarded with content from a new bakery that’s reposting ‘grams from everyone who eats there. And I experience a little manufactured FOMO. It’s as if everyone is dining there but me.
It’s all very stupid.
To be clear: We all know Insta can be great for restaurants and diners alike.
Every now and then, I’ll learn about a great new special, or whether my favorite spot is closed for a private event. And since I was talking about culture and context, I appreciate how certain restaurants use the “grid” to post little stories about a particular dish or two, the way a museum might put a thoughtful didactic next to an abstract work by Norman Lewis. Sometimes, this sort of thing is less intrusive than a waiter’s tableside speech.
Insta can also be an affordable option for cash-strapped restaurants. No need to buy domains or deal with web hosting. No need to sit at a laptop and tweak a menu pdf every single day while you should be helping your team prep for dinner service. Just snap a pic of that wagyu panzanella or kimchi hot dog and post it in a few secs. And get back to work.
Indeed, it’s quite possible that some restaurants simply prefer to connect with patrons this way. They want you to find out about the menu through friends and feeds, through vetted social photos and clips. They don’t want you craving a list of items printed on paper; they want you craving the sunlight-dappled matcha fettuccine with dehydrated seaweed that your semi-famous buddy was eating on camera….after a bicep workout. Sounds like a fun anthropology paper. Or a lot of nonsense.
Wait, how much does that pizza cost, the one I’ve seen 37 photos of? Who knows.
So here’s my take: Online menus are good. They tell you everything you need to know in a single glance or two. No need to scroll through an entire feed, or “screenshot and zoom” before Instagram decides to show you something else after 10 seconds.
Also: Menus usually have prices. Instagrams and TikToks generally don’t.
But here’s the larger question I have for restaurants: Do you really want a social media site — run by the Facebook folks — to be the central point of digital contact between you and your patrons. A social media site that purposefully floods us with videos of cats washing themselves to the tune of “Y No Hago Mas Na,’” all while folks are just trying to find out what’s for dinner. Do you really want this to be your restaurant’s only digital home, a place where you’re competing for the public’s attention with not just other restaurants, but with paparazzi pics of Mikey Madison walking her chihuahua in a Mugler velvet midi.
So maybe let’s make a deal, dear restaurants. You can keep your Instagram. I love it as much as you do. But please, try to post your menus online. Think of it this way: No one will ever have to put in a password and agree to terms of service to access your “menu” tab.
Your patrons just have to click.
Kindly list your supplements online!
Like I said earlier, I don’t need my favorite tasting menu restaurant to post all 23 courses online. They can go ahead and surprise me.
But here’s something that irks me: At quite a few chef’s counter spots, it’s not uncommon to be presented with three or four optional supplements…like caviar, wagyu, and truffles. They’re dishes that can easily double the price of a meal to $800 and beyond. Once, when I asked an omakase server for a list of their add-ons, they specifically asked me not to post that menu online!!! That makes for mighty pricey impulse purchases. Please, put let us budget ahead of time! List your supplements online.
One more thing: Put your dessert menus online!
Ugh! We’re already living in an era where pastry chefs are struggling to justify their presence in kitchens; sweets are one of those things that patrons cut back on when restaurant prices shoot up (see Genevieve Yam’s BonApp piece for a more layered look at what’s going on).
If you’re going to employ pastry chefs, why hide their work? Why put a food menu online but omit the desserts? Why prevent patrons from getting excited about the sweets? Honestly, I’d go even further. When you sit down at a restaurant, a waiter normally hands you a drinks menu, a wine list, and a dinner menu. I’d prefer if they passed along a list of desserts as well. At the same time. So you can plan ahead. So the banana ice cream gets equal footing with the lamb shank.
Review: What to order at Dominique Ansel’s Papa D’Amour
Plus: Why you should try the BEC at Birdee, and the pan piñita at Lulla’s
