Putting the star dish at the top right because "that's where everyone looks" sounds like science. It isn't. Much of what gets repeated about restaurant menus comes from consultants' advice or from badly flawed studies. And what has actually been measured offers more useful, and much cheaper, clues than moving a dish to a corner.
Where do diners look when they open the menu?
From top to bottom, like a book. That's what Sybil Yang, a researcher at San Francisco State University, found when she tracked people's eyes as they read a menu. No "sweet spot" appeared where the gaze lingered.
What did appear was the opposite: a "sour spot", the area with the least attention. It was the restaurant's own information and the list of salads.
That's good news for anyone designing a menu, because the logic gets simpler: what you want to sell goes at the start of its section, and sections run in the order people eat. No hiding the star dish in a corner and hoping an optical trick does the work.
Does dropping the currency sign make people spend more?
It may, but the finding is more modest than it's made out to be. A Cornell study tried three price formats on 201 tables at the Culinary Institute of America's café in New York. With plain numbers and no sign, spending per person was $24.87 against $23.00, 8% more than with the other two formats.
Did you know? The original paper hides a surprise: writing the price in words ("twenty dollars") made no difference compared with using the sign. In other words, the sign alone didn't explain the gap, and the authors dropped that hypothesis as they had framed it.
It's one restaurant, at lunchtime, in 2007. It's a clue, not a rule. Something similar goes for decimals: ending in .95 is treated as universal, and a study of European menus found that restaurants here end their prices very differently from American ones, though on a small sample.
What matters at a restaurant in Tenerife is something else: a clean price reads better than a cluttered one, and a column of figures aligned to the right makes life easy for anyone comparing by price rather than by dish.
Do longer descriptions sell more?
They probably help, but the number everyone quotes has a problem. The claim that a good description lifts sales by 27% is attributed to a 2001 paper by Brian Wansink, and in 2018 Cornell concluded Wansink had committed academic misconduct, including misreporting data. By then, 13 of his papers had been retracted.
That doesn't mean that particular study is false, but nobody should build a menu on that figure. What's left is common sense, and it works: "grilled cherne with our own green mojo" tells someone who doesn't know the dish more than "fish of the day". A description doesn't have to be poetic. It has to remove doubts.
Photos on the menu: yes or no?
It depends on the restaurant, and the most famous figure has no study behind it either. The line that "photos lift sales by 30%" came from a menu consultant, not an experiment. The same article mentions an Iowa State University test in which campers shown a salad photo were up to 70% more likely to order one. It's curious, but a campsite is not a restaurant in Costa Adeje.
In a tourist destination, the photo does another job: it translates. Visitors from the UK, Germany or Italy can't always read a menu in Spanish. For someone who doesn't know what papas arrugadas are, a good image solves what a translation can't explain. A bad photo, mind you, does more harm than none, as we explain in the photo that decides where people eat.
How many dishes should each section have?
There's no proven number. "Seven options per category" is once again a consultant's opinion, and the idea that diners look at a menu for 109 seconds travels from article to article without anyone saying where it came from.
The sensible approach is to look at your own sales: if a dish doesn't get ordered and just takes up space, it can go.
| What gets repeated | What's known |
|---|---|
| "Everyone looks top right" | The eye-tracking study didn't find it: people read in order |
| "No sign sells more" | 8% more at one restaurant, in one study |
| "The pricey dish sells the one beside it" | A reasonable theory with little direct evidence |
| "Descriptions add 27%" | A figure attributed to an author found guilty of misconduct by his university |
| "Photos add 30%" | A consultant's opinion |
| "Seven dishes per section" | A consultant's opinion |
What does the law require on a menu in the Canary Islands?
No psychology applies here. The Canary Islands' restaurant regulations, reformed in 2019, require all prices to include IGIC, the local sales tax, and the words "IGIC incluido" must appear clearly and visibly. They also ban setting prices according to market rates, and charging for cover, table or booking.
Did you know? The "market price" you see on so many fish menus clashes with that rule, which also requires a food menu and a drinks menu. The most common menu trick isn't a design choice: it's a mistake.
What can I check on my menu today?
Two things, in five minutes:
- Read only the first line of each section. Is it what you most want to sell? If it's the cheapest item or the one you least like making, there's your first change.
- Hand the menu to an outsider and ask them to choose out loud. If they ask what a dish is, a description is missing there, and the tourist who doesn't dare ask is probably stuck in the same place.
If you want it to match what people see online, also check the menu that shows up on Google.
Organising a menu so it reads well, meets the rules and works in several languages is exactly what we do in restaurant menu design, part of our graphic design work for restaurants. If yours could use a once-over, tell us about it.