Menu psychology: what the research actually supports

Search for menu design tips and you will find the same claims repeated everywhere, often with confident percentages attached. Some are backed by decent research. Some come from studies that later fell apart. Some were never tested at all. Here is what we found when we went back to the sources, so you can spend your effort on the changes that are likely to matter.

Dropping the currency symbol: some evidence

A widely cited 2009 study from Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research (Yang, Kimes and Sessarego) gave diners in a restaurant different versions of the same menu. Guests whose menu showed prices as plain numbers, like "14", spent more on average than guests whose menu showed "$14.00" or "fourteen dollars".

It was one restaurant, so treat it as a reasonable idea rather than a law. It costs nothing to try, and many modern menus already do it. Keep it consistent: one format across the whole menu.

The "golden triangle": mostly myth

The claim: on a printed menu, eyes go to the middle, then the top right, then the top left, so put your most profitable dishes there. It is repeated in countless articles, but direct evidence is thin. Eye-tracking research by Sybil Yang at San Francisco State University found diners tended to read menus much like a book, from top left onwards, rather than jumping around a triangle.

On a phone the question mostly disappears, because a digital menu is a list. What matters is simpler: a dish has to be scrolled to before it can be chosen. The first section, and the first few dishes in each section, get the most attention. Put the dishes you most want to sell there.

Anchoring with an expensive dish: plausible

Anchoring is one of the best-established effects in psychology: the first number we see influences how we judge the next. The menu version is to include one premium dish, such as a large sharing platter or a top-grade steak, so that the dishes around it look reasonable.

There is less direct restaurant research on this than on the general effect, but it is low-risk if the premium dish is genuinely good. A dish that nobody orders still does its job if it makes the second-most-expensive option feel like good value.

Descriptive names: useful, but ignore the famous number

You will often read that descriptive dish names raise sales by around 27%. That figure traces back to work from a food psychology lab at Cornell whose research was later widely discredited, with many of its papers retracted. Do not rely on the number.

Descriptions are still worth writing, for a plainer reason: they help people decide. Name the main ingredients and what makes the dish yours. Skip vague words like "delicious" and "amazing". Our list of menu description mistakes has before-and-after examples.

Choice overload: mixed evidence, real costs

The famous "jam study" (Iyengar and Lepper, 2000) found shoppers were more likely to buy when offered 6 jams than 24. Later analyses that pooled many similar experiments found the effect is inconsistent: sometimes more choice hurts, often it makes no difference.

For a restaurant the argument for a shorter menu does not depend on psychology anyway. Fewer dishes mean less stock, less waste, faster tickets and more consistent cooking. See how long a restaurant menu should be.

Highlighting a dish: works if you use it sparingly

A box, a photo or a label like "Chef's pick" draws the eye, and it is reasonable to expect that to help a dish get ordered. The catch is dilution: highlight half the menu and nothing stands out. One or two highlights per section is plenty, and they should go on dishes that are both good and profitable. The menu engineering matrix tells you which ones those are.

Prices in a column: weak evidence, harmless to fix

Common advice says not to line prices up on the right with dotted leaders, because it invites guests to scan down the prices and pick the cheapest. We could not find strong research either way. It is easy to place the price right after the description instead, so there is little reason not to.

What to do with all this

1. Make the menu easy to read first: clear sections, short descriptions, consistent prices. No trick beats clarity.
2. Put your most profitable popular dishes where guests look first.
3. Make one change at a time and watch what happens for a few weeks.
4. Measure with your own data, not someone else's percentage. Your sales, or which dishes guests actually view, will tell you more than any study.