Bring back menus, QR codes are terrible

This process was one of my most hated "innovations" in food ordering in China. It turns every restaurant into a production line fast food operation, exactly like American chain restaurants. At that point, why even bother going to a restaurant at all? Might as well just order a Sysco-equivalent microwave meal at the supermarket or 7/11, because the flavor and the service will be exactly the same.

For me the best restaurants in China were the mom and pop joints where the person who takes your order is also the person who cooks your meal, or at least where you can see into the kitchen from the dining room so you can call out a request or ask a question as they're preparing it. This way it's much easier to figure out what's in the dish, see if the food is fresh, ask for it a bit more spicy, add another side, whatever. It makes the meal into a more of a social experience, and something that feels homey and satisfying rather than mass-produced.

Ironically going to these sorts of Chinese chain restaurants with the QR code menu, they also tended to be twice the price of the mom and pop joints, so whatever money they might be saving by eliminating a server is definitely not passed down to the consumer.

Yeah, QR code menus are superior, until you have to use them. They never have instructions and every device does it differently and not in obvious ways. The only instructions you get from a stressed out server is "just scan it." Ok, how?

This is a great way of making tech look stupid to luddites and it reminds me of modern UX trends that expect people to just know how to do some mysterious thing--and developers rely on most users assuming they are the stupid ones because they don't know how to use an app's hidden functionality. Not. Accessible.

Every restaurant used to have the same UX, now they are all different. Stupid.

It's also super fun to download a 45mb menu on your cellular data plan every time you want to look at the menu.

I don't understand the "now they're all different" facet of this. In my experience during the pandemic, they are all the same, just in a way that is not discoverable, as you point out. But after the first time I realized I just needed to open my camera app to make it work, it became a really nice experience. There is a balance here - discoverability is good until it becomes clutter because nobody needs to discover it anymore because it is commonplace, and symmetrically a mechanism that is quick and easy but lacks discoverability is bad until it becomes commonplace and second nature. A great example of this is the mechanisms to open camera apps on phones (which this QR menu thing builds on!): there is no way to discover that I need to press my power button twice to open my camera, but once I know this and it is second nature, there is absolutely no better way to accomplish that task.

Interesting, so the presence of a QR menu is a restaurant-quality filter perhaps.

If they have a QR menu move on until you find one that does not ... you are likely getting a more authentic meal.

Exciting positive answers to this problem would be:

1) All such restaurants offering free open wifi + 2) A commercialized system that hosts the menu PDFs on tiny https servers on the restaurant's wifi router and serves them locally (potentially avoiding issues with far-away outages and also saving on the internet bandwidth for the common case).

Now I have to connect to their wifi before I can see the menu? And the restaurant is expected to maintain a menu server? What is MORE practical about this?

>This process was one of my most hated "innovations" in food ordering in China. It turns every restaurant into a production line fast food operation, exactly like American chain restaurants. At that point, why even bother going to a restaurant at all? Might as well just order a Sysco-equivalent microwave meal at the supermarket or 7/11, because the flavor and the service will be exactly the same.

I usually can't stand comments that are just "correlation does not imply causation," but are you sure you aren't mixing up the two here? It's not hard to imagine why a McDonalds wouldn't be one of the first to pick this kind of technology up, but I have a hard time that a previously good restaurant that adopts this will suddenly have their quality fall down the shitter. Nothing really changes for the wait staff except now the order shows up on a screen instead of a handwritten form.

>For me the best restaurants in China were the mom and pop joints where the person who takes your order is also the person who cooks your meal, or at least where you can see into the kitchen from the dining room

There's a similar sort of thing in Japan, but with older technology. You place your order with an automated kiosk out in front of the restaurant and pay the machine. It spits out a ticket that you hand to whoever and eventually your food comes to you. It exists at large chains as well as some mom and pop places, including some where you're sat eating your food a few feet from the cook/chef. The places I went to that had these didn't seem to suffer from lower quality than their counterparts without such a system that didn't have it, nor did they feel more "mass-produced."

How does ordering via QR code change the quality of the food itself? Just because you clicked a button to order the food instead of telling a server what you want who then wrote it in a notebook and went back to a terminal to enter it, should not have any bearing on how the food tastes.

The QR code doesn't change the quality of the food. It's just a correlation that the restaurants that moved to a QR code ordering system tended to also be the ones that hired kids who didn't much care about cooking, and who just produced the same bland dish every time, regardless of who was ordering.

I do my best to eat plant-based most of the time, so I always appreciate when I can have a chat to the cook or server to see what is in the dish and if they can avoid garnishing with ground pork or whatever. To me that's the whole point of going to a restaurant, to have someone cook for you personally. If you're just going to get a production line meal, then you might as well order from a vending machine or get a meal to go from a convenience store. No judgment on those meals, they are fine too, but when I go to a restaurant I expect a bit more of a personalized service.

What changes is you no longer have a customer service rep on the line, which is what you de facto have with a server at your table. I could ask them questions about all sorts of specific ingredients on the menu so I end up guessing nothing about what I am ordering. For online menus, sometimes you take a shot into the dark because you can't get any description on the item besides "89. - Orange chicken" or however it comes up on the online menu. Does it come with rice? How big is the portion? Who knows.

My comment wasn't very clear. What I was getting at - and perhaps this is a China-specific issue - is that the QR code style restaurants are imo a symptom of gentrification and are contributing to the "blandification" of local cuisines.

In China restaurants can go under very quickly - you might see at a certain location two or three different restaurants in a year. The mom and pop operations tend to be eaten up by the national chain restaurants and "hip" (i.e. QR code ordering) franchises, and when one of these restaurants moves in then not only does the food quality go down, but the prices go up too. I think a lot of young Chinese techies like the change because it seems more clean or more hygienic or more futuristic, but if you just want to sit down and get some local food made by a local person, that experience is harder and harder to find.

Most ordering-apps I've tried allow customers to customize items and make special-requests. It's often easier to do these things on an app, and these modifications are automatically reflected on the receipt.

I guess an app could give people access to a webcam to engage in discussion with a cook as they prepare the food, for people who really want to watch the process and talk to the cook.. is that a feature you'd be interested in?

I mean, obviously, that wouldn't be right for a lot of places -- many eateries don't want people bothering the kitchen staff -- but if you've been going to places where people can interact with the kitchen-staff as they work, and if that's something the customers value, it'd seem like that process could be made more available.

Edit: Actually, when you were talking about engaging kitchen-staff, were you thinking of places like Subway? Or did you mean actually talking to people in a separate-kitchen, like you walk back there and chat with them while they make the food?

I believe they’re referring to places small enough and slightly open so that you can see the few kitchen workers.

I ran into a few of those mom and pop joints in Korea as well. Basically every 김밥 (kimbap) shop is kinda like subway where you can see them prepare the food.

I believe they were talking about how interacting with an actual human is part of the experience of going out for them. And just going to a restaurant in order to fiddle with a menu screen and order kind of defeats the purpose since you could just do that with takeout? It doesn’t bother me either way, but I prefer restaurants that have a button on the table to call the server.

I think my comment is a bit centered around the Chinese experience.

A lot of smaller Chinese restaurants are just one guy at a wok standing near the entrance and a bunch of stools inside (sometimes also outside). They're commonly a husband and wife team, where the husband cooks and the wife acts as a runner or takes orders when it's too busy to bark what you want at the cook, but sometimes it's just the one person. If you get there early, sometimes the wife is preparing mise en place at one of the tables, or on a stool out front.

Another common layout for larger restaurants is tables and stools on the inside plus a small counter to pay, but there's a window at the back going into the kitchen where they might have a couple of cooks and more space to prep.

In both of these cases it's not unusual for customers to know the owners and engage in some smalltalk, whether about the food, or whatever other thing. It's a lot like a classic diner in the US, or a UK "caff".

These QR code ordering systems tend to be in place at a different type of restaurant. They are more like strip mall chain restaurants with optimized seating and standardized menus and nobody knows anyone or cares. Personally I don't see the point of these sorts of places, because if you're just getting Sysco-style meals without any service then you could cut out the middle man and buy the meal without going to a restaurant.

If QR-code based ordering doesn't decrease the quality of the food (I think everyone agrees it doesn't) why should others have to subsidize your 'personal touch' experience paying higher prices for increased wait staff attention when they may be OK with (and prefer!) impersonal service, which has a built-in lower cost of delivery?

It seems to me your focus is less on the quality of the food (provided it means quality standards) and more about the ambiance and experience of another human catering to your customized requirements. In any other domain this would be a luxury you'd be expected to pay more for.

I say bring on the impersonally delivered, high quality, cheap food!

No, you can use your cellular connection all you want. It'll just eat your data. If you want to trade a little effort for a little data saving, that option is open to you.

They can change prices and/or update the menu at any time and they avoid printing, storing, handing out, collecting, and cleaning the physical menus.

An appliance menu server would cost practically nothing if they're already offering Wi-Fi or use electronic POS/ordering systems.

That depends on whether the @ff317's solution (2) also includes availability over the internet.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, this is literally the opposite of my experience. The restaurants where I was made to order by QR code always cost more than the restaurants where I was not. In China, I suspect this is because QR code places tend to be national chains which have some kind of brand name recognition, so people pay more to prove their status.

On top of the increased cost, the food tends to be lower quality, not higher quality, presumably because the ingredients are mass produced and reheated by cooks who don't have any personal reputation at stake if they prepare something poorly. This is exactly what chain restaurants in the west are like, and they tend to be a much worse dining experience than either mom and pop or boutique outfits.

"I guess an app could give people access to a webcam to engage in discussion with a cook as they prepare the food..."

headdesk

> also be the ones that hired kids who didn't much care about cooking, and who just produced the same bland dish every time, regardless of who was ordering

I personally go to restaurants for consistency. Do you really think waiters taking orders pass along information about who ordered the order and their preferences? You can give instructions to the waiter but from my experience it's not carried a large chunk of the time. Every layer is a place for miscommunication, so going consumer -> app -> cook is a lot less likely to be messed up than consumer -> waiter -> notebook? -> terminal -> cook. There's generally a high turnover for waiters and I don't think they're all super informed about the meals, but I guess it depends what restaurant you go to. But with online ordering a restaurant that can't afford to have a highly trained wait staff can still deliver high quality information to customers

You can provide a lot more information on an app about a dish, including pictures, ingredients and customization options than a person.

I think there is a misunderstanding in this thread about what types of restaurants provide these QR code ordering systems in China.

From my perspective, if I need to use an app to select my dish, applying only the pre-approved customizations, then the experience is no different from ordering delivery. If you live in the US, then perhaps this experience is not unusual, since it's a lot like the experience of visiting a chain restaurant - same menu in every location, same customizations available, same "perky" waitstaff, same supplier of ingredients behind the scenes - it's basically just a more expensive version of fast food. Adding a QR code ordering system to this kind of restaurant is not changing much about the experience other than the speed of ordering.

But in other countries - notably China - there is a whole nother class of restaurants that is both cheaper and more personalized than a chain. And these family-owned restaurants are the ones that are being edged out by more expensive, less culinarily interesting restaurants whose primary appeal appears to be gimmicky apps that provide either the same or less functionality than a food delivery app does.

It might be that these chain restaurants are successful because a lot of people prioritize consistency over everything else. But I feel like in China in particular it is more trend- and status-based. People think it's cool to order on their phones instead of talking to the server, or they think it's classy to eat what the folks in Shanghai are eating instead of the local food from their region.

Personally, I would prefer to see more local restaurants and less chains, not just in China but everywhere in the world. I understand that's an orthogonal issue to QR code ordering, just in China it does appear to be correlated.

> I usually can't stand comments that are just "correlation does not imply causation," but are you sure you aren't mixing up the two here?

FWIW I didn't read the gp's comment as implying causation. I read it purely as correlation. That restaurants that use these systems are much more likely to use other cost saving "short cuts" as well. Just because someone notes a correlation does not mean they imply a causal relationship between the two. Correlation, even without causation, can still be highly useful. Lack of causation does not equate to spurious correlations[0]. You'll note that on this website that the problem isn't that one doesn't cause the other, but rather that there's no reason to suspect these factors are correlated in the first place, and that correlation does not imply connection.

[0] https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

I really enjoy reading your comments :) Thanks! And I fully agree with you about how the restaurant restaurant should be.