Menu Tricks I Forgive and Menu Tricks I Do Not

Take the currency symbol off the prices and people spend more. Not slightly more. Measurably more, repeatedly, across studies and across countries. Anyone who has ever designed a menu knows this, and a good proportion of them have done it.

I do not think that is cheating. I think roughly half of what gets called menu manipulation is simply design, and the other half is fraud in attractive typography, and the useful work is drawing the line between them rather than maintaining a vague suspicion of everything. My line, stated up front: design that changes what you notice is fine. Design that changes what you believe you are paying, or what you believe you are getting, is not.

There is no neutral menu

Before the complaints, an admission the critics of menu design usually skip. A neutral menu does not exist. Order is a claim. Spacing is a claim. A box around something is a shout. Font size, the length of a description, whether the prices align in a column or trail after the text, whether there are photographs at all: every one of those decisions pushes attention somewhere, and refusing to decide is itself a decision that pushes attention somewhere worse.

A menu that genuinely declined to guide you would be a spreadsheet, and you would hate it. You would take nine minutes to order, choose badly, and blame the restaurant. Guidance is a service. The question was never whether to persuade.

The tricks I forgive

• Dropping the currency symbol, or the decimals. The price is still right there in legible digits. Nothing has been hidden. It reads as less transactional and it makes people slightly freer with their money, and I find I do not mind, because at no point was I misled about the number.
• Anchoring with a genuinely expensive dish. One serious, expensive item near the top makes everything under it read as reasonable. This is textbook anchoring and it works on me even now that I can see it happening. It stays on my acceptable list for one reason: the anchor is a real offer. I can order it. If I do, I get it.
• Long, specific descriptions on the dish the kitchen does best. Naming the producer, the cut, the age, the method. Provided it is true, this improves the eating. Knowing what you are eating is not a trick, it is context, and context is a legitimate part of flavour.
• Short menus. Nine mains rather than thirty-one. Restricting choice is a kindness that also happens to help the kitchen, and both of those things can be true.
• Putting the profitable dish where the eye lands. The high-margin dish is very often also the dish they have made four thousand times, which makes it the one most likely to be excellent. Our interests are aligned here more often than people assume.

The tricks I do not forgive

• Market price with no number. Nobody is protecting me from volatility. I am being made to choose between asking and looking foolish, and the design knows it.
• The decoy that exists only as a prop. An item priced or portioned to be obviously poor value, present purely to make its neighbour look sensible. The decoy effect is well documented and this is the version that crosses the line. The difference from anchoring is precise: an anchor is a real offer I could take, a decoy is a piece of set dressing dressed up as an option.
• Service charge in small grey type at the bottom edge. If it is going on the bill, it is part of the price, and it should be legible from the same distance as everything else. Whether it should exist at all is a separate fight, one I have had in the tipping piece.
• The verbal upsell that conceals a price. Still or sparkling, asked in a tone that makes tap water sound like a refusal, followed by a bottle nobody mentioned costs money. Specials recited at length with no prices attached. This is standard practice across the industry and it enrages me more than anything else on the printed page, because it is deniable. Nobody wrote it down.
• Descriptions that imply a size the plate will not deliver. Not photographs, which everyone discounts automatically. Words. A dish described in a way that suggests a main course and arrives as three bites belongs to the same family as the padding problem I set out in the tasting menu piece.

The line, stated properly

What separates the two lists is not how clever the technique is or how much psychology sits behind it. Anchoring is at least as sophisticated as a decoy. What separates them is whether I could have understood the deal.

Direct my attention however you like. Make the duck sound wonderful. Put it in a box. Give it the best position on the page. But when I look at the bill, the number should be the number I could reasonably have worked out from the menu. Persuasion operates on what I want. Deception operates on what I know. Only one of those is a menu doing its job.

The objection: grow up, it is all marketing

The strongest pushback I get runs like this. Margins are brutal, every business nudges its customers, this is what commerce is, and a diner who resents being persuaded should stay at home and cook.

I agree with most of the premise. Margins really are brutal, for reasons I have gone into in the piece on closures, and I have no interest in a world where restaurants are forbidden from selling. But the objection collapses two different actions into one word. Persuading me to order the duck and preventing me from knowing what the duck costs are not the same activity, and calling both of them marketing does not make them so.

Take the symbol off the price. I honestly do not mind. I still know the number, and knowing the number is the whole test.