How Menus Manipulate Your Mind

The Baltimore Sun's Liz Kay has a great post on that paper's Consuming Interest blog about how restaurant menus are designed to get diners to spend more money.

For instance, high-margin meals are often listed in the center of the right-hand page because that's where people's eyes generally land first.

Some of the post is based on a 2000 how-to article by the National Restaurant Association, which goes a bit deeper into the manipulative psychology of menu design. For example, diners are attracted to dishes that are described as "marinated," "roasted," or "cooked in our wood-fired oven." They aren't so attracted to dishes described as "fried." In that case, the article advises, call the dish "hand-battered."

Kay notes that people tend to focus on the top two items and the bottom item on any particular menu list. Those are good places for restaurateurs to put items they want to move.

And the blog offers a longstanding, but often-forgotten, piece of advice for diners: Don't order wine by the glass—it often has been sitting open for many hours, if not days. Also, don't order the second-cheapest wine, which many people do so as not to appear tightfisted. Restaurateurs know that, so that wine is often the one they want to get rid of the fastest.

In an earlier post, Kay noted how menus that leave dollar signs off the prices lead to increased sales of pricier items.