What's simpler than a menu? You list a bunch of stuff out and people choose one and tell you, yes, give me that one. Right?
When I started Edzo's in 2009, I had a couple vintage pepsi menu boards with the little plastic letters you jam into grooves listing out the various items.
People would verbally just tell me their order and I would punch it into the ancient push-button cash register machine with thick plastic overlay so the buttons didn't get greasy. That was just for ringing up the sale. I'd have to then tick off their choices on a little order pad I had pre-printed with the various choices, writing special requests in on the side in my little squished writing, and pass that ticket down to the cooks to tell them what to make and whether or not to put onions on it.
At the end of the day, I'd do a "Z" report that would print off on the receipt paper, which I would then pore over, transferring the sales data onto a spreadsheet I created.
It was terrible. So slow. So inefficient. So many opportunities to make mistakes. And we did.
At some point, we upgraded to a touchscreen point of sale system where I could punch in the choices and tickets would print for the cooks. Way better. Credit cards were processed in the same box rather than a separate little machine we had to have a separate phone line for also.
Then all the online ordering apps came along and we had to have 3-4 separate tablets sitting up by the register and when they chirped, we'd go over, read through the order, and punch it in manually on the old Micros touch screen.
That's when things really started to change. People got used to ordering on Door Dash or Uber Eats and looking at--and interacting with--menus on their phones. Many folks enjoy the newfound sense of control. Being able to look through every possible option and tick the appropriate boxes to customize their order to their heart's content appeals very strongly to a certain mindset.
It was too expensive for most restaurants to create their own in-house ordering apps so most of us found ourselves at the mercy of the third parties for a while if we didn't want to miss out on all that online ordering business. So we used them, even though we lost money on most of the orders we took through those services and their business practices (and their drivers) were often shady.
Then the technology kind of caught up with the ordering apps. Square and Toast came along and leveled the playing field, offering restaurants the ability to set up their own online customer-facing ordering systems which could then connect seamlessly with our kitchens.
Someone on their computer or phone could scroll through a menu we write and maintain ourselves, places their order, pays for it, it populates into our kitchen and the money gets transferred into our bank account. No middleman except the credit card processing fees, which we're already paying anyway. Tickets print, food starts to get made, all without the manager on duty in the restaurant having to do anything or even touch a button or a screen. Amazing.
So when I re-booted Edzo's in 2022, I embraced this technology, as I had embraced each new development that came before. One of the first challenges I encountered was writing the menu in a way that it could be both customer-facing AND allow for quick efficient in-house communication about the menu items (mostly via printed tickets or touch screen monitors).
Like for instance, on my menu that the customer looks at, the fries have always been called "fresh-cut fires with sea salt". But on the printed dupes that the fry cook's printer spits out, it just says "small fries" or "large fries". We dispense with the flowery descriptive language when we're just talking between ourselves, it's not necessary and it's usually too wordy. Grilled Chicken Breast Sandwich becomes "Chix Sand". You get it.
But the Toast system didn't allow me to vary the language for customer-facing vs. back of the house. I just had to choose one name which would be used throughout the system for each item. Which made for some funny-sounding conversations on expo.
"Can I get that patty melt on table 9, please," I would say. My cook would look at me confused, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. Long pause. Then..."ohhhhhhh, wait...you mean 'The Classic Diner Patty Melt'? Oh, ok. coming up, 2 minutes, chef!" Eventually, I gave up trying to use BOH lingo and just went with it.... "how long on my Classic Diner Patty Melt for table 3, please?" After a while, it even got shortened to stuff like "how long on the Classic Diner with tomato for 11, please?" A very strange evolution.
There were lots of little tweaks along the way. The "single" and "double" burger items became "build your own burger" so folks would understand what to do. (Cause without that instruction, they didn't). Rather than just leaving people to figure out that they should choose "no bun" if they want a burger without bread, we added a "burger in a bowl" menu item. But "burger in a bowl" looked so similar to "build your own burger" on the ticket that cooks quickly skimming tickets during busy times kept mistaking one for the other. So eventually the bunless burger option (sorry, no, we will not "wrap it in lettuce") became just plain ol' "Burger Bowl".
It was a fairly constant struggle to find the right language to strike the balance between being as descriptive as I wanted to for the customer's experience and using words and phrases that our cooks with varying English language skills and education levels would be able to understand from reading a greasy 2"x2" paper ticket on the fly during a hectic rush.
One thing I've discovered is that customers love to order items with a simple, nondescriptive name. "Freddy's Wonder Burger" will get ordered a lot more often than "Double Mushroom Swiss with special sauce, lettuce, pickle on a pretzel bun".
This is counter-intuitive to me. I personally prefer non-cutesy names that are just a simple description of the food contained within over some gimmicky cartoonish faux identity that tells you nearly nothing about what the food actually is. I've come to understand that I'm in the minority on this one.
A decade or so ago, I worked an event billed as a "battle of the burgers" and we all cooked up our creations on the patio outside Tribune Tower. When I filled out the paperwork, I wrote in my burger name as something like "4oz. beef, Merkt's cheddar, jalapenos, spicy mayo, and Nueske bacon".
The marketing/production people emailed me back that it sounded good, but I needed to come up with a fun-sounding title for my burger.
I hated that idea. That was back when I still placed some value on not "being a sell out", whatever that meant. This was a corporate event produced by a corporate event production company with big corporate brand name sponsors and I had somehow convinced myself that a cutesy name for my burger creation ran was the exact opposite of the DIY independent restaurant punk-rock ethos I had convinced myself I was embodying. Can't even blame it on youthful idealism, I was in my 40's.
Anyway, an old friend of mine and I got together one night and got really high and decided to come up with the stupidest-sounding name we could. Long story short (too late!), our burger was named the best out of 32 restaurants there. Thee Spicy Sconnie was the big winner!
I won an all-expenses paid trip to Miami Beach for the Food and Wine Festival where I got to meet Anthony Bourdain. Which I think kind of brings the whole wannabe-punk-rock-anti-establishment pot-smoking poser-surburban-non-coporate-sellout story full circle.
Now I use the cutesy names for menu items because I know people like them. This was a good compromise for me to make because ultimately, clinging to the whole "that's not how I do it" thing seems kind of pointless. If it enhances people's experience and they enjoy it, then what's the difference? I guess I'm mellowing with age.
Then there was the whole question about having a paper menu for folks to look at vs. having a big menu on the wall vs. using an app- or phone-based system where folks order digitally on a device. I learned quickly how strong feelings were about this.
The menu isn't just a means to an end, it's a part of the experience. And, again, I started out being too rigid and one-dimensional in my approach and eventually, backed off.
When I first installed the order-off-your-phone ordering system in 2022, I loved how it allowed me to make changes on the fly which were then reflected immediately on what customers were seeing. No old paper menus with outdated pricing floating around out there creating false expectations. Items we're out of that day are never seen by customers in the first place, rather than having them ask and be disappointed when they're told we don't have that today, sorry.
So I went all-in on the phone-based menu. No paper menus. No menu on the wall. Either use your phone or I can show you the menu on an iPad and take your order verbally.
For some, the digital order-on-your phone experience was a positive, but for many, they hated it. Many would struggle with the tech, having never used a QR code before. At least a couple people a day would refuse to even try, and then when I offered to take their order the old way would angrily storm out. They missed the old way and if they couldn't do it that way, the experience just wasn't the same for them. Or they hated the technology. Maybe both.
So I'm learning to evolve and I'm pondering how to do it better for the next incarnation. I want to be flexible about it, but I also want to stay true to my instincts about what the right way to do it is. I also need to be pragmatic and set it up in a way where it works for all the various approaches. The technology is wonderful, it saves a ton of time, allows customers access to more information, results in fewer errors, and helps us run faster and more efficiently. But I don't want lose the warmth, the humanity, the old-school vibe that I think is such an important aspect of the experience.
I think I've come up with something that will work... I'll detail it more in a subsequent post as this one has become quite long.
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