Menu Design (Unappetizing Demons)

The class started with a video, which if I was 25 years younger, would HAVE been heaven. Now, mildly interested but I can do this at home, dude. The program was a 'deconstructed' look at the bones of a restaurant, many angles which we have looked at in the first few weeks of classes. Lots of factoids were thrown at the watcher: people eat out 218 times a year on average, old and secondary cuts of meat are held for customers who order their meat 'well done', in Holland their Department of Health requires the restaurant's report grade posted for all to see, which resulted in less than 50% of their restaurants getting an A to over 75%. (Here in NY, a customer has to request the DOH report to see it.) Over all, it was informative and to the point, considering a lot of the ca-ca out there fronted by twits like Rachael Ray.

The next part of the class was a review of a chapter in our text, "Management By Menu", which provided illustrations to Richard's review of rudimentary principles of graphic design and typography. As a person in charge, even if you're not an expert, you need to share a vocabulary with your 'consultant', which is restaurantese for freelancer.

Richard presented each table with a handful of menus and we critiqued their design and layout. We lucked out and got a WTF kind of menu from a place called Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens, and if you think their name is a mouthful, you should see the menu. It looks elegant, but the natural colored paper is a poor contrast to the black ink. There is a large box about their food philosophy, that just rambles and sounds like a cranky old man trying to be funny. The descriptions go on at length, making dumb jokes, and the sections have cutesy headers like "Things You May Want to Eat Before You Eat Something Else" (that's appetizers, to us unwacky folk) And most inexplicable of all, there were random sketches of demonic characters all over the menu, which wasn't explained and didn't seem to have anything to do with the theme of the place. After, we find out it's a California joint -- ah, that explains it!

To close out the class, Richard handed out a graphic design disaster. Tomorrow, the last day of menus.