Restaurant menu secrets revealed: Part 1

Restaurant menus are like any other type of advertising. They're designed to tease and tempt, tweak your curiosity, and create enough intrigue that you'll want to come back again. 

"It's your main opportunity to sell," says Jennifer Purcell, the associate dean of restaurant education and operations at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, N.Y. Purcell ought to know. She's taught classes on menu development, and explained during my recent visit to the CIA that there's a lot of serious science that goes into a menu, from the size and appearance of the print to the feel of the paper and descriptive prose used to describe each dish. 

Nothing on a menu happens by accident. It's all the result of careful planning and focus-group testing. Studies have shown, for instance, that sales can increase by placing a border around an entrée's name and description or putting it inside a box that's shaded a different color than the rest of the menu. Photographs, too, can make items more irresistible, but the law states that the actual dish must look like the picture, Purcell says. 

The term "gaze pattern" describes how customers eyeball a menu, that is, where they tend to focus first and go from there. The pattern differs depending on the number of pages or folds. The "hot spot" on a single-page menu, for example, is just below the midpoint. On a two-pager, the eyes move quickly from top to bottom on the left page, then stop cold about two-thirds of the way down on the right-hand side. That's where you'll generally locate dishes with hefty profit margins like pasta with marinara sauce (food doesn't get much cheaper than that) and signature dishes, which are high-volume movers. 

Even among appetizers there's a hierarchy. Ever notice how cheap-to-serve offerings like simple salads, hummus dip, and bruschetta (toasted bread topped with olive oil and tomatoes) are usually listed at the top or bottom of an appetizer list? Again, it's not random. Customers tend to zero in on the first and last items, and forget what's in between.

Tomorrow, we'll talk about some of the most unusual menu terms you've probably never heard of. For free information on restaurant trends and deals click here. You'll need to subscribe for a list of the nation's best and worst chains. In July, we'll be publish an updated list, based on a brand-new survey of more than 70,000 Consumer Reports subscribers.