Can I See a Menu That Doesn’t Need a Battery?
A QR code can put a restaurant menu on your phone. It can also turn ordering lunch into a small technology project.
You sit down at a restaurant and ask for a menu. The menu is a little square printed on the table.
Point your phone at it, open the link, and there it is. Unless the camera doesn’t pick up the code. Or the link opens a PDF designed for a sheet of paper roughly the size of a placemat. Now you’re enlarging the appetizers with two fingers, then sliding sideways to find out what they cost.
This is a strange amount of work to learn whether the place has soup.
QR menus do have their uses. A restaurant can update an item without printing a stack of new menus. Some pages fit a phone screen nicely. Fine. But a menu has one job for the person sitting at the table: let them see what there is to eat. It shouldn’t matter whether their phone is charged, their camera cooperates, or the restaurant has enough signal near the back wall.
And there’s a particular awkwardness to sitting down for a meal and immediately being told to take out the thing everyone was trying to put away. The table gets its own little collection of glowing screens. Nobody’s ignoring anybody, technically. They’re trying to find the sandwiches.
The paper menu wasn’t a miracle of design. Pages got sticky. Specials were crossed out. Sometimes the dessert menu arrived only after everyone had decided they were too full, which seemed like an unfortunate business strategy. But you could pass it to the person across from you without saying, “Wait, I lost the page.”
What makes the QR code funny is how close it comes to being a menu. It sits right there on the table, occupying space where a menu could go. It tells you where the menu is, provided you brought another object that can go get it. A tiny sign saying “Food information available elsewhere.”
None of this is the server’s fault. They didn’t design the website, and they’re probably tired of explaining which corner of the square to aim at. If someone asks for a physical menu, they may even have one. Which is lovely, though it does raise a question about what the square is doing.
A menu is one of the few things that should get simpler when you’re hungry. Set it down, look at it, order something. Instead, there are tables where the first course is troubleshooting.
Hold on. The soup prices are in the other column.
The conversation
Have a thought? Add it below. Comments are reviewed before they appear.
