Hello restaurateur!!
A few weekends ago, a friend and I were out for dinner, doing what we always do, which is arguing over the menu for way longer than the situation called for.
I landed on Kashmiri naan somewhere in the middle of all that arguing.
Neither of us had ever had it, neither of us knew what it was supposed to taste like, but I was in one of those moods where you talk yourself into being adventurous and then drag someone else along with you.
Let’s just get it, I said, how different can it be?
My friend looked at the menu, then looked at me, and said, okay, but make me imagine it.
That felt like a fair ask, so I looked at the menu again, hoping it would help me out this time. It just sat there with a name and a price, offering nothing else to go on. There was so little to imagine from that I couldn’t even help myself, let alone her.
We ordered it anyway, because that’s usually how these decisions go.
The Kashmiri naan arrived looking suspiciously like a dry fruit platter with a side of jam that had wandered onto a piece of bread.
It turned out to be genuinely good, though it was nothing close to what either of us had pictured, and the whole way home I kept coming back to that one line my friend had said.
Make me imagine it.
Because that’s really all a menu is supposed to do.
We’re all imagining the food
Every time I read a dish name, my brain starts trying to fill in the blanks.
What does it look like?
Is it sweet or spicy?
Is there something crunchy in there?
Is the portion enough for one person or the whole table?
I do this without even thinking about it, and I’d guess most people do too.
That’s probably why more restaurants are now adding a line under the dish name. It’s rarely just Kashmiri Naan anymore; it’s Kashmiri Naan, soft flatbread layered with candied dry fruits and a hint of sweetness, finished with a drizzle of jam.
One sentence, and suddenly I can actually picture it. And once I can picture it, I’m a lot more comfortable ordering it.
Plenty of menus still skip this part entirely, though. Just a name, sometimes just a fancy font, with the rest left entirely to the customer’s imagination or the server’s patience, since the question usually ends up back at their table anyway, occasionally sending them into the kitchen for a quick huddle before they come back with an answer.
The Japanese tradition that solved this decades ago
Japan figured this out a long time ago, with something called sampuru.
Walk down a street in Tokyo, and you’ll see restaurant windows lined with astonishingly realistic replica dishes, made of wax or resin, showing you exactly what you’ll get before you’ve even stepped inside.
It started as a practical fix for a real problem.
Tourists and locals alike couldn’t always read the menu, so restaurants gave them something they could understand without reading a word of it. You just looked, pointed, and ordered.
That idea has quietly found its way back into menus themselves.
I recently came across a reel of a restaurant menu with tiny miniature versions of each dish physically mounted onto the page, right next to the name, the replica sitting directly on the menu you’re holding instead of tucked away in a display case somewhere.
You look at it, right there in miniature, and you just point. The imagining has been done for you.
It’s a genuinely brilliant idea!
What you can actually do this week
You don’t need a 3D printer or a sculptor on payroll to fix the Kashmiri naan problem. You need one sentence per dish.
Write it like you’re explaining it to a friend
Skip the fancy food writing. Just describe what’s on the plate the way you’d describe it if a friend asked you what to order. Ingredients, a hint of taste, maybe how it’s served.
Flag the dishes people ask about most
Ask your servers which dishes get the most questions at the table. Those are the ones costing you the most confused orders and the most trips back to the kitchen for a quick huddle. Start there.
Say what makes each dish different
If two dishes share half their ingredients, tell the customer why they’d pick one over the other. That’s the line that actually helps someone decide between them.
Read your own menu like a stranger would
Sit down with your menu and ask yourself, for every single dish, could you explain this to someone who has never eaten here before? Whatever you can’t answer confidently is the one to rewrite first.
Fixing this needs neither a redesign nor a budget, just someone in the kitchen willing to stop assuming the customer can read minds.
Make them imagine it right
Most people aren’t like me and my friend, happy to gamble on a plate of mystery bread just to see what happens. Most people will play it safe and order the dish they already understand, which usually means the same three items keep selling while everything else on the menu just sits there, unread and untried.
Your menu is the easiest place to fix that, since it needs no new equipment and no extra hands, just better sentences. A regular who has ordered the same dish for years and a first timer standing at your door deciding whether to walk in are both reading the same words, so make those words work harder.
The next time you sit down with your menu, read it the way my friend read hers that night. If any dish leaves you with nothing to picture, that’s the one asking you to make it imaginable.
Until next week!