By: Jeremy Caplan, Time
Friday, November 07, 2008


It's no secret that the cost of a restaurant dish tends to mirror its complexity. That's why a menu item that says "medley of berry conserves and pureedpindas " is likely to cost five times what it would if it were just called peanut butter and jelly. But it turns out that obscure menu terminology may be just half the game. A new study suggests that typography also plays a role in influencing diners.

In a paper that will appear in the October issue of Psychological Science, Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz suggest that small changes in menu fonts can significantly alter people's perceptions of dishes' complexity and value.

"People infer that if something on a menu is difficult to understand or hard to read that it takes great skill and effort to prepare," says Song, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Michigan. "When I go to an expensive French restaurant, I can hardly pronounce the words on the menu, so I take for granted that it's expensive because it's not comprehensible."

Similarly, Song says, using an offbeat typeface to obscure a dish's description may signal hidden value to an unsuspecting diner on unfamiliar ground. That may explain the implicit logic employed by restaurants offering exorbitant entrees described with elaborately scripted fonts in microscopic print.

To read the entire article, see the Time website at http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1813950,00.html.