> * pictures of every dish are desired by plenty of customers.*

I'd expect my waiter to look rather puzzled if I asked for a picture of my food, and also perhaps be politely remined that I am not in a fast food outlet.

Besides, for anyone completely lost in a restaurant with unfamiliar dishes (on holiday perhaps) the age-old solution is to simply ask the waiter for recommendations, or point at another diner's dish if that looks good. Or just choose the dish of the day — it's usually the best option anyway if you picked a decent restaurant.

My go to criteria for picking a restaurant is "do I not recognize the dishes they are serving?" As in, I prefer to go to places where I don't recognize anything on the menu.

I'll rotate through eating at a handful of restaurants until I've sampled everything on the menu, then I'll go look for a new batch of restaurants to try out.

In other words, my day to day is being in a restaurant with unfamiliar dishes!

That said I have no qualms ordering a dish and not having any idea what I'll be getting, but I know plenty of adventurous eaters who want to have at least a general idea of what they'll be getting and having a bunch of pictures available is easier than asking the waiter to describe every dish in a menu for a new cuisine.

(The one flaw with this plan is my rate of exploration is greater than the rate of new restaurants opening in my area, even living in a major west coast city, so I have to keep travelling farther and farther from home to find new places to eat! Also different cultural groups centralize in different places, which can lengthen the commute needed to find good food!)

> Online menus with pictures of every dish

The invention of color photography, and large and small format color printing, make it unnecessary for the whole thing to be online. You can have pictures without all the issues of online - like small, low-resolution screens (relative to paper all screens are low-res screens), and being coerced to give away personal data.

If it were this easy, they would've printed images on menus long ago. Which a few restaurants actually do, but usually only a few dishes.

That said, I refuse to go to any restaurant that has a QR code menu. Last straw was the place with a broken website sending their images with the text MIME type.

It's not hard. It's just a bit more work - enough that it starts requiring a professional to be involved (graphics design, photography, coordinating print), whereas traditional menus can be half-assed[0] by anyone with passing familiarity with Word and access to the office printer.

In contrast, the digital menus usually come as a solution, packaged with a promise of some juicy business analytics, so the restaurant only needs to sign the contract and send over some files - that's even less work than regular paper menus.

So no surprise they're jumping to "high tech" - they're really outsourcing menus to a marketing company.

--

[0] - I don't know how things are at the very highest tier of restaurants for the rich, but for those accessible to less rich, it seems the higher-end the restaurant is, the worse the menu is. Bad design, typos, etc. I suppose having an established reputation allows them to get careless about the minor details.

I would expect the most expensive part to be printing and laminating those menus, which will also be longer due to the space used on images. Then they need to be cleaned, possibly updated, and will still go bad over time.

Printing is cheap and, even with a half-decent consumer-grade inkjet or laser printer, takes very little labor. Laminating is much more labor-intensive, though it's not bad as long as you stick to a standard paper size[0].

In my experience, somehow, in the transition to digital and past worries about "dead trees", most people missed the fact that paper and printing are dirt-cheap these days[1], and if you account for e-waste, often much more environment-friendly than digital alternatives.

--

[0] - We bought a laminating machine recently, so my wife could make various educational tools for our kids herself. It quickly stops being fun once you're trying to laminate a bunch of arbitrarily-cut shapes on a single shit; keeping things aligned is a PITA.

[1] - Well, not if you're paying a print shop. I think that biases the intuition for many. Even color printing is too cheap to meter if you have a half-decent printer at home.

I've been to restaurants with home printed laminated menus. It cheapens the entire experience, to an incredible degree.

The inks fade very quickly, the lamination job feels like, well, a elementary school art project, and there is no way a nicer upscale establishment is doing this. (And with food prices being what they are, almost everyplace now days is a "nicer" place!)

Meanwhile there is a damn good reason that the fancy expensive cocktails at get their own full color advert at every table! Making food look good, with high quality design and printing, makes the food look more desirable.

Yeah, fancy restaurants will often use non-laminated paper menus that I assume they have to reprint frequently.

Really fancy restaurants update the menu frequently as well, at least seasonally if not more often. Sometimes they leave a version number or revision date at the bottom!

I've been to restaurants that have pictures of every dish on the menu. Those menus end up being the size of large books, and in one case the menu was delivered in the form of a three ring binder with laminated pages to flip through.

Good menu layout and design costs money, laying out 30 or so pages with full pictures of every dish, and then printing a bunch of those up, is not reasonable.

Meanwhile online menus can be searched and filtered through.

That said I think that online menus are generally sub-par compared to paper, mostly because paper is better than a screen for most things, for people who don't know a given cuisine, pictures are essential.

Some restaurants in my city use a middle-ground solution: there's a tablet on each table (running Android, of course) on which you can order and pay (but that part is full of dark patterns, unfortunately). But you also still get a paper menu. And paper menus with pictures are great.

There's a whole industry of food photography and even creating durable fake food to sit on the counter to advertise dishes. Seeing is believing .. and advertising. Can also convey more detail about what's in something and how much you get.

I have a soft spot for cafeteria-style "point to order" systems myself, especially when there's a language barrier. But that does impose a certain industrial feel on an establishment.