You can tell a lot from a restaurant’s menu – not just what you can get to eat, but some other things, too. It would be kind of weird to have spaghetti and meatballs on the cover of a pancake house restaurant – and it would be kind of gross to have grease stains and tomato sauce on a rumpled sheet of paper that lists the restaurant’s specials.

A Menu Is A Defacto Business Card

A menu acts as the restaurant’s business card and can quickly give you some ideas about its inner workings. A dirty menu might imply a dirty kitchen; a clean and neat menu creates a different impression. Even though the main purpose is to tell you what’s to eat, a secondary objective is to make you forget about money so you make your food and drink selections without thinking about the price.

The way the menu looks should be in sync with the restaurant’s concept and image — the décor, service, food quality, and price range — and give you an idea about what kind of eating experience is in store. A six or eight page plastic coated menu, the kind usually found in diners, doesn’t convey the same dining experience as the two page leather bound menu found in an upscale restaurant.

Tip:

A menu’s design should be in sync with the restaurant’s concept and image — the décor, service, food quality, and price range — and give you an idea about the overall dining experience you can expect.

Disorganized menus might mean a kitchen without a plan. A menu with a huge number of offerings (unless it’s a place like a diner with a big turnover) makes you wonder how fresh the food is – and how it’s being repackaged into different kinds of offerings. A dirty menu is like a dirty bathroom and should make you think about the cleanliness of the kitchen and the people working in it!

What are your thoughts?

Do you eat out? This is the third article in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.

Do Restaurant Menus Influence What You Order?

January 19, 2012 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

As you sit down at your table, the waiter hands you your menu. You scan the pages with your eyes darting here and there. Where do they land?

Menus are one way a restaurant attempts to build trust with you and if the menu you’re looking at has a well thought out design, psychology is playing a major role.

The Menu Is Part Of The Brand

A restaurant’s menu is part of its brand and how it looks sends out subtle signals to the customer. A dirty menu may send a message that the kitchen is dirty. A bright, clean, well-designed menu probably means a clean, well-designed operation.

Menu design affects the bottom line, too. Thoughtful menu redesign can improve sales by an average of 2 to 10% — by subtly directing customers to order higher profit margin items.

Is It Your Decision What To Order?

Customers don’t really decide — on their own — what to order. If done right (from the restaurant’s point of view), a menu should lead customers to what the restaurant wants them to order. The trick is where the menu items are placed, the graphics, and the descriptions. For a four-page menu (including the front and back covers) the “position of power ” is above the center on the inside right page.

A menu item’s position on a list also affects sales. Human tendency is to remember the top two and the bottom item on a list. High profit margin and high appeal items get high profile spots. Logic plays a role, too, like putting appetizers in the top left panel — a high-profile position the eyes get to first since appetizers are usually the first things people eat.

The font, the print size, boxes, and shading all help draw attention to an item. Menus need to be graphically exciting, but people have to be able to read them. Things like borders, illustrations, symbols and bold type also focus attention.

Although the same item may sell differently when it’s put in a different spot on the menu, servers play a major role in determining what customers ultimately order. A well-designed menu helps to steer people in the direction the restaurant wants them to go but it’s the servers who close the deal.

 The Importance Of Words

Some words have more selling power than others. “Roasted” or “cooked in our wood-fire oven” are more attractive than “fried.” If the item actually is fried, describing it as hand-battered, which tells customers the item is fried without saying it’s fried, sounds better. Making the descriptions of high-profit, high-quality items more appealing than others directs customers to them.

There’s most likely a continuum of appeal. What the restaurant really wants to sell should sound as delicious as possible. The other items should sound good and taste good —just not as good as the signature dishes.

Where Do The Numbers Go?

There’s an art behind the placement of prices on the menu and that placement is critical. Aligning prices in a straight column on the right leads customers to “shop-by-price” because despite mouth-watering descriptions, the eye tends to go straight to the prices.

Customers are savvy and listing menu items with the prices from most expensive to least expensive is something they quickly figure out. Experts recommend positioning the item’s price at the end of the description, in the same type and boldness, and without a dollar sign (even the dollar sign makes the customer a little more aware of the price) — an approach that helps the customer focus on the product rather than the price.

Do Restaurant Meals Sabotage Your Diet?

September 22, 2011 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Are you afraid to eat out for fear of “blowing your diet” or because you think there aren’t good choices to be had? Are you tired of hearing that you shouldn’t go to restaurants if you want to control what you eat?

Choices

You can choose to eat out and eat well. You are responsible for making good choices for yourself.

Your first choice is when you select which restaurant to go to (do you want grilled fish or a huge plate of pasta). The second round of choices come when you’re inside the door and confronted with the menu, the breadbasket, and the portions.

Restaurant Meals

I eat out a lot. After years of cooking for a very active family of five, I’m quite happy not to cook every night. I actually find it easier to control my portions and calorie consumption when I eat out in restaurants.

I follow a number of unwritten guidelines that, over time, have become habits.

I eat in the restaurant rather than ordering in or bringing prepared food home. It is too difficult to eyeball portions when they arrive as full containers and it is far too easy to eat too much by finishing off the last bits rather than saving or tossing the leftovers.

Select Wisely

I pick my everyday restaurants carefully and I’ve developed relationships with the wait staff. I certainly go to special restaurants on occasion and really enjoy the fantastic food – but that’s not my everyday fare. My “everyday” restaurants serve food that is friendly to my eating patterns.

They offer a range of lean proteins and vegetables and are amenable to swaps. My local diner is so used to me ordering a side of spinach instead of home fries with my eggs that they bring it without my asking. They make food swaps with pleasure – not with grumpiness. I’m a good customer and ask very politely.

I don’t let the breadbasket even land on the table (if I’m eating with others it goes near them — my husband agrees with the breadbasket taboo). Bread is way too difficult to resist when it’s staring you in the face and can add hundreds of calories before you get to the main course.

I usually drink iced tea, water, diet coke (yep, I like it), or a glass of wine. These choices account for zero to around 120 calories for the wine (one restaurant sized glass).

If I do have dessert at an “everyday” restaurant, it’s berries in season. If they’re not sweet enough I sprinkle a little Splenda on them – which makes my husband wince, but I find quite satisfying.

By no stretch of the imagination am I so controlled that I eat plain lean proteins and steamed vegetables all of the time. Far from it – but for routine meals, I try to stay away from sauces, dressings, and sides of pasta, rice, or potatoes. When I really “dine” at the finer restaurants, I deliberately choose (not always successfully) to limit either the number of courses or the portion size. I attempt – again, not always successfully – to lay off the bread and control the liquid and dessert calories — often choosing either an appetizer or a dessert.

When I’m with other people who are ordering an appetizer and an entrée I often will order two appetizers instead — a practice that is so common that most waiters don’t even blink an eye. I find that if food is in front of me I’ll eat it – especially if it’s a lengthy meal. The smaller the portion in front of me (appetizer size) the less I eat. Still tastes darn good.

No Trauma

Don’t let the thought of eating out be traumatic. Restaurants exist to serve you meals and it is up to you to choose which one to go to and what you will eat when you get there.

If you know you’re going to go for broke because you’re eating at a special place – or just because you want to – don’t freak out. Eat and enjoy — you can always compensate by controlling what you eat earlier in the day or the next day. Be careful about depriving yourself — you don’t want to feel so “cheated” that you end up raiding the fridge when you get home and chowing down on more calories than if you had eaten a full meal in the restaurant.

Control Calories

January 13, 2010 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Americans eat out, on average, six times a week. I’ve read that statistic in many places and can’t argue with it. I often eat out a lot (more than six times a week if the truth be told) — for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and in all kinds of restaurants – diners, cafeterias, and places with tablecloths on the tables.

That’s my lifestyle, and having to be constantly vigilant about managing my weight, I had to learn how to control my caloric intake while eating out.

It’s certainly easier to control the portion size and fat and calorie content of your food if you cook it at home. In your own kitchen you know what you’re putting in your food. And you don’t have to put bread on the table if you don’t want to or do things like rinse your vegetables in oil to make them look fresh and pretty.

Restaurants love to use butter, oil, full-fat dairy, and higher fat meats. Their business is to make food that tastes good and to entice you to come back again. What goes into your food is, for the most part, in the hands of the preparer in the restaurant kitchen whose primary objective is not to keep the calories down (unless that’s the promise or the response to your request) but to get your food on the table.

But, you can learn ways to control your caloric intake when you eat out. You can easily make requests and small changes that put you in charge of the calorie count while still enjoying your dining experience.

I’ll be talking about additional strategies to use in future posts, but for now, here are some things you can do to cut the calories:

Learn the code words on the menu that signal the fattier and more caloric dishes
Be pleasantly assertive when asking to go “off menu” or to have food prepared in a specific manner – like grilled rather than pan fried
Be aware of mindless eating: olives on the table, peanuts at the bar, tastes of everyone else’s food
Learn how to eyeball portion sizes and commit to eating that size rather than cleaning your plate. Premeasure at home so you have a guide about how much, for example, 5 oz of meat looks like – or 4oz. of wine. Commit it to memory so you can eyeball portion sizes
Stay out of the breadbasket – and, if you do indulge, lay off of the butter, olive oil, and other dips
Practice trade-offs: if you’re going to have dessert eliminate the appetizer and vice versa
Check out the menu ahead of time and decide what to order so you are not tempted by the possible calorie laden “special of the day”
Rehearse these words so they become your habitual request:
- dry toast/pancakes/English muffin (no butter)
- dressing on the side (for salad)
- do you have skim/low fat milk?
- no whipped cream
- sauce on the side for entrees/vegetables
- may I have salad instead of French fries/onion rings?
- hold the mayo (try mustard instead)
- is the sauce tomato or cream based?

I’ll be posting frequently about additional strategies to use when eating out.

What are some strategies that you use to control your caloric intake in restaurants?