There are third parties that make the websites such as ChatFood: https://www.chatfood.io/order-at-table

The most important part of being tech savvy is being savvy about choosing your vendor.

And even having the budget for yet another vendor

#1 I saw a lot. Word documents hosted in private Google Drive accounts, mobile-unfriendly websites, etc.

A website? You had actual websites? We got mostly PDFs of paper menus. And they would often give you an actual paper menu if you asked.

Everyone forgot about digital menus fairly quickly after it became clear that covid doesn't spread through surfaces though.

Many restaurants I patronize still use QR by default, including very high-end restaurants.

Reused menus were always a gross idea so I'm on board with this.

How gross are menus compared to, say, doorknobs, railings, or chairs? There are a lot of things we touch in a restaurant, and I want to know why menus, specifically, are what’s gross.

It's probably more about how visible gross stuff can be on a menu because you're holding it up in a reading position and staring at it for a few minutes.

That said, menus spend a lot of time on the table, some of that while food and drink is being consumed - apps/drinks are ordered and people continue to ponder their meal choices as they munch. The drinks splatter, the food drips sauce and grease, etc.

Because of the visibility factor, you're confronted with this information far more than you would be for a doorknob or chair. That's going to cause some to consider the menu more gross than those other features.

Finally, tables and chairs and doorknobs and railings all get cleaned from time to time, with tables and chairs often wiped down between guests. Paper menus don't take well to being wiped down with water or cleaning solutions. You can laminate, but laminated menus tend to be associated with cheaper / lower class establishments.

At a place with a continuously changing menu this is less of a factor as menus are reprinted often, sometimes daily. When the menu is static, paper menus might stick around for a while, accumulating residue and getting more visibly dirty over time.

It's a regular part of waitstaff sidework to go through the menus and clean the laminated kind or discard messy, crumpled, or otherwise unpresentable paper. Many servers will even notice as they're collecting them from a table and toss the bad ones immediately. Apart from basic pride, messiness reflects badly on the whole restaurant and affects their tips!

Exactly. How about those shared ketchup bottles and salt/pepper shakers in most diners?

Everything could be gross to touch if you really think about it too much. Your phone is probably worse than any menu.

> A website? You had actual websites? We got mostly PDFs of paper menus. And they would often give you an actual paper menu if you asked.

Not just any website. Often it sends you straight to some online ordering portal like Toast or Doordash. And this bring all the slow performance and pop-ups and adware that implies. Very fun to try to load these bloated web apps when you have 1 bar of cell signal.

Actually I had that happen to me in Dubai last year. They wanted me to order through the website, I put my order in and then a card payment form came up. I didn't have any internationally-accepted cards back then so I had to order through the server to be able to pay cash. Oh and on top of that they didn't have any real drinks, only bottled soft drinks at 3x the grocery store prices.

I imagine most of the business in such places comes from delivery so they don't care much about dine-in guests.

See, I actually usually preferred the PDF menus to websites. Usually traditional menus are laid out in a really intuitive way that groups items logically, flows, and gently guides you to the better dishes.

When it's a website, it's often lousy long lists where you can only see 3 or 4 things at a time, have to scroll super far back up and down to compare things, and have no idea what the restaurant is nudging you to order.

>> One reason is etiquette. Everyone knows it’s rude to take a phone out at a table, but that’s what a digital menu demands.

I disagree with the everyone knows part. In certain age groups, I don't think they actually consider it rude to be glued to their phone regardless of location. Whether I agree with them or not, social norms evolve.

I don't think it's age groups as much of classes of people. Certain people of all ages are glued to a screen and certain people have manners.

> classes of people

Yeah no...

You got downvoted for this for using the term “class” but I tend to agree. In this context it has nothing to do with how much money you make. I have know classy broke people and trashy rich people. For me, using your phone at all during a meal better be met with an apology and, likely, some reason offered to the group, the same as if you jumped up and ran out the door. Mentally, that’s what picking up your phone is.

It's perfectly acceptable to take a phone out at a table everywhere I've traveled.

It's rude to be glued to your phone everywhere I've traveled; or to talk on a phone during a meal.

Which is also why I said TFA missed the reason by a mile. "Everyone knows it’s rude to take a phone out at a table" isn't true at all; and demonstrates that the author is out of touch with the general public's relationship with tech.

I'll add that they better have open WiFi just to be sure everyone can actually access the menu.

I was on a wifi-only plan during covid and QR menus absolutely sucked.

> It's actually very rude and insulting to force someone to "learn tech" on the fly. It has little to do with if the patron is tech-savvy.

I'm glad you said this. Our industry is full of people who quantify that their job is "easy". We have a history rife with these assertions, including a period of time where we thought everyone would want to code and that we were just trailblazers. I think that hypothesis is becoming less and less true in interesting ways every day. The most I've seen is people interacting with very facade levels or niche implementations of languages to do their jobs. Even then, those are mostly scientific fields to begin with.