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.