In a paper that will appear in the October issue of Psychological Science, Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz suggest that small changes in menu fonts can significantly alter people's perceptions of dishes' complexity and value.
"People infer that if something on a menu is difficult to understand or hard to read that it takes great skill and effort to prepare," says Song, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Michigan. "When I go to an expensive French restaurant, I can hardly pronounce the words on the menu, so I take for granted that it's expensive because it's not comprehensible."
Minuscule menu print has become so commonplace that some restaurants, such as Eleven Madison Park and the Union Square Cafe in New York City, offer reading glasses for guests who need them, in the same way other restaurants offer dinner jackets. They do so not because their menus are poorly designed, which they are not, but because some guests, particularly those with declining vision, have grown accustomed to using reading glasses in dim light for menus with fine print. In Baltimore, an eye-care firm launched a program called MenuMates providing upscale area restaurants four pairs of reading glasses in a wooden recipe box.What strategies do you use to make the most of your menu?
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