The hidden messages in menus

Restaurateurs and those who advise them have long argued that people read menus in predictable ways. The received wisdom holds that a diner will start on the right-hand side of a menu, a little way above the middle, before zooming up to the top right-hand corner. Then he'll jump backwards to the top left and down the left-hand page, then finally fill in the gaps in the bottom-right and the middle.

Not so, apparently. New research from San Francisco State university claims to overturn this notion. Once they had hooked people's heads up to computers, presented them with menus and studied their eye movements, the researchers found that participants read menus sequentially from left to right, like books. (In part, this confirms Gallup research (pdf) from 1987.)

The findings could have important implications for menu design and the way we order in restaurants. Restaurateurs might need to rethink placing their showcase items at the top-right of their menu or just below it. The menu from Keith McNally's majestic New York brasserie Balthazar, deconstructed in this paper a couple of years ago, proudly places "Le Bar à Hu?tres" at the top-right of the page, with its high-margin plateaux de fruits de mer at $70 and $115 and half a lobster at $23. (It also sticks a prawn cocktail there for $15: this might look expensive in isolation but seems almost cheap beside such expensive dishes.)

Menu design is a complex and opaque business. A menu reflects the spirit of a restaurant, its beliefs, presumptions and pretensions. Typeface, style and structure communicate the values. A cleverly pitched menu can make a diner who chooses the lowest-priced item feel like a cheapskate and the one who orders the most expensive feel like a sophisticate. And most good menus – except in the flashiest, show-off places – cleverly insinuate a notion of value for money that the place itself might not deliver. The menu is the shop window for the kitchen, of course, and thus one of the most effective and consistently reliable means of getting money from the customers. Restaurateurs have developed a number of tricks and tropes with it.

Boxes draw the customer's eye, highlighting whatever is inside them. If something is in a box on a menu, it's a reasonable bet that the restaurant makes a decent profit on that dish – or at least that the kitchen is particularly proud of the product. Pound signs and zeroes are mostly out nowadays – "￡15.00" looks much more money-focused and expensive than the nakedly trendy "15", and "￡9.99" seems horrible compared to "9.50" or even "9.95". Few customers understand restaurant economics enough to do anything more than guess at the margins on specific dishes, but they are sensitive to contrast. So almost all menus bundle expensive items with cheaper ones: more specifically, they price some items relatively highly for what they are and list them next to the most expensive items of all, like the prawn cocktail above.

Consider the menu of The Delaunay (pdf), the latest place from Corbin and King, which opened a few months ago near Covent Garden. It's a great restaurant, and this is a masterclass in serious menu design. A full half-dozen boxes highlight the things they want you to order: from low-cost, high-profit items such as chicken noodle soup at ￡6.75, cheese at ￡9.75 or a banana split at ￡7.75 (avoid this one, if you go: it's ridiculously oversweet). Also boxed are beluga caviar at ￡235 and various wieners (teehee), these being showcase or signature dishes deemed worthy of special prominence.

Way down at the bottom-left of the menu, hidden under the caviar box, are the sandwiches, including a chicken panino at ￡6.75. The placing tells you everything you need to know: these are low-rate, unimpressive dishes, and you'd be forgiven if you felt a bit cheap ordering them, especially in such a grand setting. (Here we see how a menu can deliver prejudices that a waiter never could.) The Delaunay's salads include a dish of "winter beetroots and honeyed goat's curd". This comes in two sizes, a small for ￡7.75 and a large for ￡11.50. They don't tell you how much bigger the large one is, and in fact they probably expect you to choose the small version, which looks cheap next to its sibling but would be expensive in isolation.

"Salzburg soufflé" for two at ￡16 ("8.00 per person" on the menu, because some people will forget to double up) is the most expensive pudding and carries a 20-minute wait: it's aimed at couples, who tend to care less about price than others. For who wants to look cheap on a date? The Delaunay's menu, progressing from soups to coupes, is obviously designed to be read from left to right. Corbin and King, two of the most gifted restaurateurs this country has ever produced, seem to have understood intuitively what the recent research from San Francisco has confirmed.