The restaurant menu is the first port of a call for diners to glean information about what their culinary experience might entail.
Pristine-looking menu items numbered with big red markers allow diners at McDonald’s to order with ease. A cha chaan teng might offer a large menu with up to 10 categories of dishes, with many items holding slight deviations to account for every taste. Fine-dining restaurants might hide pricing to isolate quality from high price tags.
The manner in which restaurants reveal information (or not) about prices, present novel dishes, elucidate their concept, and use targeted language (or languages) on their menu is telling.
The design, composition, presentation, language, and construction of menus can communicate a restaurant’s explicit objective. For example, a common aversion for diners when it comes to menus is that many believe the larger a menu, the lower the food quality, an assumption that might have some grounding.
Yet, for The Cheesecake Factory at Harbour City in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong’s only location of the popular American restaurant chain, the restaurant’s mega-menu has managed to subvert this assumption, enthralling diners since its opening here in April 2017.
The Kowloon venue has 157 items on the à-la-carte menu, plus 35 cheesecakes and desserts. No other Hong Kong restaurant has as large a menu as The Cheesecake Factory, captured in a booklet with categories for appetisers, salads, meat and fish, and pasta.
“When The Cheesecake Factory opened its first location in 1978 in Beverly Hills, California, the restaurant featured a simple and straightforward two-sided menu,” states Vincci Tsang, assistant marketing manager of The Cheesecake Factory in Hong Kong.
“Over time as the restaurant added new dishes to keep pace with guests’ evolving tastes and dining preferences, the menu grew and became the ‘book’ that it is today. Today, The Cheesecake Factory is known around the globe for the size and book-like format of its menu.”
The hour-long waiting times at peak hours at the weekend are testament to the hearty American restaurant and its long menu’s success in Hong Kong, where choice of dishes is typically narrowed to highlight more premium options and the highest quality of ingredients.
A restaurant that shuns length on its menu and prioritises a succinct one-pager is Moxie, an all-day “conscious dining” restaurant at LANDMARK. With Moxie catering largely to a crowd of busy finance and business professionals in Central, all information on the menu has been designed and limited to dishes selected precisely to get lunch diners fed quickly and back to their desks.
Didier Yang, head of operations of The Arcane Collective, encompassing Moxie, Arcane, and Cornerstone, is succinct about the power of a short and concise menu.
“Previously, we worked with a menu that was a little bit too cluttered, with too many pages. A lot of guests would lose interest in reading three pages of different things. There were two pages for starters, two for mains, one for dessert, and two for set lunch and dinner.
Condensing and consolidating [our menu] to one page, where anyone can see what is on offer, allows us to grow beyond the menu.”
With the introduction of select meat and seafood dishes to the formerly vegetarian-only restaurant in 2022, Moxie’s menu also reflects this change, translating to a one-pager that highlights value and quality over quantity. The menu features starters, mains, desserts, set lunch, and dinner items.
“We wanted to make it clear that we are adding on to our restaurant rather than changing the direction. Moxie is more open, very casual, and very fast-paced. Our menu now is straightforward – you get what you get. You can look at the section that’s appealing to you, and that’s it.”
Most menus only feature words, and that’s not a bad thing. Menus paired with pictures of food may sometimes elicit the opposite reaction towards the transparency of seeing what physically constitutes a menu item – think fast-food outlets and low-quality beachside restaurants.
Jacky Ng, co-founder of Check In Taipei, operates three modern Taiwanese restaurants in Causeway Bay, Tsim Sha Tsui, and Yuen Long. The chain has supplanted Taiwan’s typically carb-heavy and beige-looking cuisine with splashes of colour, both on the table and menu.
Pictures, according to Jacky, are how he distinguishes Check In Taipei from other competing Taiwanese restaurants, whilst also modernising the cuisine to suit Hong Kong tastes. The menu is painted with pink, turquoise, and ocean-blue colours. Every dish is illustrated with bright images and modernised with vibrant plating.
“I really want my kitchen team to focus on what they’re best at in operating the kitchen,” says Jacky. “I can help find local Taiwanese trends to bring onto the menu, working with the chefs to nail down how to execute those dishes to keep the same traditional flavours, but incorporate those bright elements.”
Jacky describes the intention to include every dish photo on the menu as a way to prove and “showcase that we can elevate Taiwanese food. One of our advantages is the plating of our food and colourful ingredients.”
Check In Taipei effectively breaks down the stereotypes of picture menus as lazy or obsolete. Yes, the restaurant’s food can speak for itself, but the energetic images on the menu go further to capture that spark of modern Taiwanese cooking.
Another F&B business directing a modernisation of a popular cuisine through menu design and images is ÔDELICE, a casual French bistro chain operating five Hong Kong venues in Wan Chai, Tsim Sha Tsui, Sha Tin, Tsuen Wan, and Tseung Kwan O.
Founder Julien Draeger saw a niche in the markets of Hong Kong and Shanghai to launch a chain of affordable French bistros. The menu, both its design and the concept of sharing classic French plates, is a point of interest for the Frenchman to break the stereotypes associated with the value and price points of French food.
“We want to play up on the Frenchness of ÔDELICE with the menu. We incorporate casual foods from France, such as galettes, crepes, pastas, steak frites, and duck confit.
The menu reflects that the whole concept is suitable for the middle class and affordable in price. It is informal and contemporary in design and with a friendly service, without having to break the bank every time you go to a French [restaurant].”
The framing and design of the menu, Julien says, reflects a Frenchness rare in Hong Kong. Gold detailing, the use of French words to describe the dishes, and illustrations of traditional plates assist diners in grasping the quality and authenticity of the recipes served up at the chain.
“Our menus have been tailored to Hong Kong, with an all-day menu and price points that are attractive. We have brought in seafood dishes to the restaurant to relate to Hong Kongers as islanders.”
Julien, alongside his partners, changes the menu three times a year at the five restaurants in order to embrace seasonality. His mission in Hong Kong is to break stereotypes of French food and democratise the cuisine, beginning with the menu itself.
“When you are a French restaurant in Hong Kong, you are often labelled as expensive, formal, and an occasional choice. The core of our concept is to disrupt that stereotype and help people understand that French dining can also be for every day.”
