Menu Design

[by Naveen]

A set of coincidences has made me more aware of the confluence of design, psychology, and the restaurant industry. Inspired by the release of Presentation Zen Design, I started listening to Glimmer from audible.com (a great way to make the time pass faster in the line at the RMV), to try to understand what exactly is meant by the term "design." I still don't have a concise definition, but some combination of engineering and psychology seems to be a common thread. That reminded me of a couple articles in the New York Times and New York Magazine about menu design. Both articles mentioned restaurant consultants who teach where to place items on a page, which format to use for numbers, and how to utilize descriptive language (a trend in supermarkets, too), among other techniques. Many of these same skills are involved in creating efficient, elegant slides for presentations, so I wonder if my renewed interest in slide design could eventually lead to some freelance work for menu consulting.

how to throw a cocktail bash in four easy steps

[by john]

this past weekend, i threw a two night cocktail fête. it was perhaps the closest i will come to opening a bar, with different guests every night, waves of drink orders, and gourmet bar food. (mad props to mike and andy for the crispy shredded pork awesomeness, gravlax, and bone marrow.) i had tremendous amounts of fun without drinking anything, save for a few dozen milliliters from test-straws. homing in on each guest's taste proved to be a delightful challenge. i will certainly do this again.

now, easily:

create a menu

i put up my menu last time, but gave no indication of how hard it was to make. i tested tens of drinks over the course of a week to see which would appeal to a wide sample of palates. and, in addition to the pet pet, i created two originals - a st. germain/applejack marriage (la pomme rouge), and a constantly varying - popular, too, it turned out - tequila cocktail (the ho[a]rfrost).

everything on the menu got great attention and compliments, except for the poor martinez. being the oldest drink on there, maybe it couldn't hang with this hip crowd. noted. but otherwise, i am elated for converting many guests to the wonders of sloe gin, regular gin, spicy finishes, and flamed chartreuse.

go into debt

having settled on a menu, i then biked around boston/cambridge for another week trying to gather the necessary ingredients. the word is out on rittenhouse, quality bourbon, and old monk rum, apparently, because i had to discover several new liquor stores to hunt them all down.

after all my shopping, i went (a predicted) $200 over my normal budget for the month. i calculated the cost of each drink: usually around $3, and $4 for the tipperary. i figured each guest would go through ~3 rounds, so asked for $10 donations. in the end, i recouped exactly $200, perfect!

for the nth time, i'd like to reiterate how cheap home bartending is, compared to going out.

focus on the freezer

at some point, maybe 10 days before the party, i realized with growing dread that i would need a lot of ice. like, 200 cubes per night. only the brute force solution was viable: i bought two more tovolo trays and pushed out batches each day and night into ziploc bags. by friday morning, i was satisfied with five gallon bags, four trays in reserve, and five non-cubical trays in super-reserve.

some further creative maneuvering allowed me to fit cocktail glasses in there, too, so they could chill before service. good thing we weren't serving gelato or something.

stand around

the hard parts are done. now you only need to stand in one place for three hours and shake or stir the shit out of lots of drinks. stand, and also listen, steer, cajole, charm, engage, introduce, rinse, muddle, crack, and pour.

i had not expected the rush i got from bartending. it's like being on a kitchen line, but colder and solo. some hardcore multitasking - remembering orders, mixing, chatting people up, and monitoring the glassware situation all at once, with outward aplomb. and the repeated delight on guests' faces with the first sip made it even better.

More thoughts on Menus

[by Naveen]

John's forays into menu analysis have sparked my own curiosity. While looking through various options for Restaurant Week, I visited several of the venues' websites to examine their offerings. One of the first things that came to mind was a recent post on Presentation Zen about typography, a ubiquitous and often overlooked aspect of presentations. The top restaurants generally showed restraint in their menu design, with a limited color and font scheme coupled with a fearless use of white-space. For comparison, I also checked out some totally different dining establishments, with different economic considerations. The contrast between places like L'Espalier and Rialto, as opposed to The Cheesecake Factory and Taco Bell was quite striking (see here for another example). I realize that my small sample size does not come close to any type of systematic data analysis, but it did make me think more seriously about menu design, as well as the use of graphic design in my own presentations.

At the end, I decided to have a little fun, and made a hypothetical menu (inspired by this):

my menu

[by john]

after criticizing several types of bar menus, i had to make my own for this weekend when i threw a two-night cocktail party. more on the fête and the drinks themselves later; for now, i want to share the menu (pdf):



imagine it with a fold down the middle, so that you have the option of deciding based solely on ingredients, or solely on description (name and my musings), or on the combined knowledge.

if i owned a bar, it would be called 'aliment' (not usually applied to drinks, but i like the word and the connotation), and if it had a menu, it would look like this one. clean, elegant, brief, and the ingredients-plus-description style. and hopefully enticing enough to obviate any gin and tonic knee-jerk requests.

cocktails and powerpoint

[by john]

all three of us here at the blog have strong opinions on what makes a good set of slides for a scientific talk. generally, they align (conciseness, high information-to-ink ratio, tell a story rather than read the slides, well labeled axes...), but sometimes our opinions clash and we find ourselves in a shouting match over the usefulness of outline slides. (yes, this happened. at drink.)

lately, i've come to develop similar strong opinions on bars' cocktail menus, which are, after all, the bartenders' method of presentation. in addition, as i prepare for my own big cocktail party, i'm thinking about what my menu should look like.

here, then, is a taxonomy of both presentation styles:

the screenshot

we've all (switching to scientist persona for a bit) suffered through a speaker who relied on screenshots of whole paragraphs from colleagues' (or their own!) papers instead of digesting the content into bulleted form. enraging.

the cocktail menu equivalents are the tomes that you can find, say, at new york's pdt. each cocktail gets half a page of rambling attention - some history, some flavor notes, some discussion of seasonality. distill it for me, already!

aphoristic

some presenters like to take the cutesy route to talks. they'll have quotes from einstein or barely related stock photos (usually of einstein as well). they might have good content, but you wouldn't know that if they were on mute.

i think of eastern standard's menu. original drink names (brock's buck) with inside-joke-sounding description (alliterative shout out). what the hell is in it?!

table

similar to the screenshotter, the table-user will lift a whole table of data into the presentation (including the unnecessary columns) and point out the important bits with a dim laster pointer.

i think beer lists are more guilty of this - especially a place like sunset tap which has about a million beers on tap and prints them all in small font, along with brewery location and abv.

maybe the old b-side menu gets close for cocktails:

succinct points

ah the elusive -good- use of bullet points. the basic information and hints of the deeper significance, without becoming a long sentence. there's enough there to understand it in itself, but the speaker fleshes out each point more fully.

craigie on main comes close to this style - the important bare ingredients or flavors, with a little color commentary. and tom is always willing to supply more information.

chalk talk

this speaker is a baller. they are probably old and well respected in several fields, partially for their skill in delivering arresting, note-free, slide-free presentations.

the bartenders at drink and milk & honey are ballers. there is no standing cocktail menu; only what they can hold in their mind. without the crutch of a menu, prolonged interaction between the bartender and customer leads to a better understanding for both.