Food Stories

Can a restaurant’s menu present a visual story?

The signage, the decor, the level of service, the napkins even the lighting all contribute to an overall story being told by a restaurant to its diners. But the menu, I would argue, is a prime vehicle for that telling. And some restaurants are using their menus in new ways to communicate.

Recently, I had dinner at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an astonishing restaurant at the forefront of the farm-to-table food movement. Blue Hill’s acknowledged story is one of natural, local and sustainable foods. I’m not sure I’ve eaten anywhere else where the ingredients mattered more than the food—as odd as that might sound. 

And perhaps because of that dynamic, the menu contained not a single of those standard overwritten course descriptions filled with endless adjectives and place names (as mouth-watering as those things sometimes sound.) The right side of the menu contained only the two price-fixe options, an additional cheese course option and a great deal of white space. But the left side was filled with a simple listing of every fresh ingredient that would be part of the evening’s dinner. Blue Hill’s story is their collection of daily-changing ingredients, and it couldn’t have been more clearly told.

Another restaurant that has recently reimagined the restaurant menu by focusing on ingredients is the newly-redesigned Eleven Madison Park. Here, from what I have read, the restaurant wants to establish trust with their diners and “take them for a ride.” Though I have not been to Eleven Madison Park since the relaunch, I imagine the restaurant’s story to be more of an intimate conservation between the kitchen and the table, facilitated by the staff. And the minimalist menu, intended to be read left to right with each line constituting a course, seems to open up that conversation. Or maybe I’m wrong? Is this menu the opposite of a clear story?

A menu, almost by definition, has traditionally been a choose-your-own-adventure situation for the diner, so it’s interesting to see restaurants using their menus to tell their own narrative. 

In other food presentation news, I was just turned on to this fantastic talk by food guru Michael Pollan. There are many things to note in Pollan’s presentation, which was designed by Duarte Design including simple visuals, limited text, making it personal, video, large-full screen images, and “sticky” stories, but my favorite technique he makes use of is that of props. Take a look at the 5:00 mark where Pollan shows how much oil goes into the making of a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. This is a technique Nancy Duarte calls a “S.T.A.R. Moment” (Something They’ll Always Remember) and Carmine Gallo calls a “Holy Shit Moment.” Whatever you call it, it’s far, far more effective than a series of bullets, and will most likely be the one thing I remember from Pollan’s talk 5 days and 5 years from now.