Rants & Raves

From Paper to Pixels: QR Code Menus Blow

Restaurants & Bars Don’t Even Try to Impress You Anymore

Image generated by the author.

There’s nothing like holding a beautifully crafted document in your hands. Whether that’s a newspaper with all the day’s news, a well-edited magazine, or a good book, there’s something about having that parchment in your paws — printed at your fingertips — that just makes for an elevated experience. The same goes for restaurant menus.

Regardless if you’re at a local greasy spoon or a Michelin star restaurant, you want a user-friendly menu to read over, right? While we could debate about the quality and style of how a menu is drawn up, I’m talking much more generally: just having an actual menu to review.

So many restaurants nowadays have a hybrid of QR code menus with their original paper menus. Some of these were conceived pre-COVID, while others were inspired during the pandemic and have become a fixture since. Indeed, QR code menus are cleaner to a degree — you’re not handling the same germ-infested document that who knows how many other patrons thumbed through before you. Now, with post-pandemic service industry lethargy, all you get is, “Sorry we’re out of menus, scan this QR code to view our menu instead.”