Over a year ago, when they reopened after the first months of the pandemic, many restaurants and clubs had chosen to give up their old paper menus in favor of more modern and hygienic QR code, the squares to frame with your smartphone to open a link. Since then many have chosen to keep them but there are those who, especially online and especially on certain industry sites, are carrying out abolitionist campaigns, demanding a return to paper menus with various more or less serious, and often nostalgic, arguments. A position that was opposed by those who, with a more rational approach, find them useful, effective and also ecological.
Invented in 1994, QR codes (“Quick Response”) are an evolution of barcodes and essentially a way to condense in a simple image so much information that the camera of a smartphone can read in an instant, for then turn them – if that smartphone is connected to the internet – into a link. In the case of clubs and restaurants, by directing to a menu, which can be on a specific internet page, or within a PDF file.
In China, where they have been widespread for years, even before the pandemic, QR codes were often the norm in many shops, even in market stalls. In Italy and in much of the rest of the world, it was the pandemic that brought them to many restaurants. Because the idea of taking in your hands, before eating, a piece of paper previously touched by who knows how many others was not at all reassuring in a period in which we overestimated the resistance of the coronavirus on surfaces, and the chances of getting infected in this way.
Also Grub Street, the New York cooking and restaurant site whose recent article “Because it’s time to go back to the paper menus“Added to the ranks of those opposed to QR Codes, he said:” at the beginning, the menus on smartphones were a smart and necessary solution, arrived in the midst of an unsolvable crisis “.
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Megan Paetzhold, author of the article by Grub StreetHowever, he thinks that now that certain premises have failed and now that certain fears have vanished, it is appropriate to close what he believes should remain mostly a pandemic parenthesis. Also in light of the fact that for the vast majority of people, handling a paper menu is now one of the minor daily risks, in the new pandemic normal.
“Recently, walking into a restaurant for a dinner, everything seemed lovely to me,” wrote Paetzhold: “the welcoming glow of the lights, the clink of glasses, the clatter of cutlery, the soothing scent from the kitchen. That restaurant had an old-world charm of its own, a studied and impeccable atmosphere that I wanted to stay in for a long time. But it was almost all in vain at the time of the menu: no elegant sheet of paper, no blackboard. On the contrary, only a QR code aseptically stuck to the table ».
“In the last year and a half I have lived my entire personal and professional life between Zoom, Slack and group chats,” added Paetzhold, who would like, at least at dinner, not to have to pull out the phone as soon as she sits at the table. In short, Paetzhold’s main argument is that QR codes are “cold, ugly and unpleasant”. Because the menus are part of the dinner experience. Indeed, in many ways, the headlines of the dinner: «the first way that a restaurant has to say ‘here, we are this’».
Other arguments from those against QR codes in restaurants concern the difficulty in opening and navigating certain menus, especially for people not used to tinkering with cameras and smartphones. Christina Cauterucci, author for Slate of the article “Give us back the menus”, She wrote, after complaining with arguments similar to those of Paetzhold:“ if you think I’m exaggerating, let me ask you if you went to the restaurant with your boomer parents ”. Cauterucci then writes that he considers menus on QR codes “alienating” even for people without smartphones or tourists who cannot easily connect to the internet.
“It is possible that I frequent a Luddite bubble”, concludes Cauterucci in presenting one of his very personal statistics, “but I have only met one person who appreciates them.”
Another issue, in this case not emotional and experiential, concerns the fact that QR codes can actually lend themselves to a whole series of security problems. In short, it would be enough for someone to pin a QR code to a table different from the real one of the restaurant, to make some diners open all kinds of links, including those capable of pointing to a virus.
(AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
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The arguments of those who do not see anything bad in the menus that open with a QR code concern their practicality, their being more hygienic (as long as you take care of where you put your smartphone), the fact that they allow you to save paper and, for restaurateurs interested, to update menus more easily, changing dishes of the day or perhaps eliminating a certain scope when it is temporarily unavailable.
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“There aren’t many things to save from the pandemic dinner experience”, he wrote The Restaurant Manifesto, recalling how for many months now “it has become impossible even to see who is serving us in the face”. The Restaurant Manifesto however, he put in order a number of reasons for “keeping menus with QR codes”. Among other things, because it avoids problems with printers (“and there are few things that anger restaurateurs more than printers”) and gives more space for allergy warnings and product information.
In other words, if the general rule of a resume applies to a paper menu (the fewer pages it takes to say what it has to say, the better it is for everyone), an online menu could, perhaps through links, be concise for those who seek the synthesis, and more verbose for those who want to deepen.
Among the analytical reasons of those in favor of paper menus there are also the instances of those who, for example, specify that they do not have any nostalgia for crumpled pieces of paper and perhaps stained by food or wine.
A compromise proposal is simply to offer the possibility to those who do not like QR codes to ask for a paper menu. Or a greater focus on digital menus, often poorly done: a feature that suggests that the problem may not lie in the instrument, but in its use. In all this, there are also those who hypothesize that the destiny of the menus is actually another, namely that of being provided on special tablets on which food can be ordered: a scenario that, speaking of nostalgics, some consider almost apocalyptic.
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