Heavenly Buffaloes, a chain of restaurants with locations in three North Carolina college towns, seems tailor-made for QR code menus. The customers are generally young and tech-savvy. Most come in hungry, many tipsy. And the menu isn’t exactly complicated.
“It’s chicken wings and beer,” says Bo Sayre, the company’s district manager. “That’s what we do. Not many people ask, ‘Which beer goes well with this chicken wing?’”
Like other restaurant owners and managers across the country, Mr Sayre placed digitized menus on all his tables in the early touchless phase of the pandemic, when contactless service was considered essential. But over time, fewer and fewer diners have given them notice.
“If they had a choice, I’d say 90 percent of customers would say, ‘I’d rather place my order with you.'”
Heavenly Buffaloes may be at the forefront of a shift in the national experiment with online menus, an invention that seemed like the way of the future not too long ago. While many restaurants today still have “scan the code” cards stuck in napkin holders or on the corners of tables, customers seem to ignore them. And many restaurants have returned to using only paper menus.
MustHaveMenus, a menu management and printing platform with about 7,000 customers in the United States, is seeing a drop in usage of the QR codes it provides to restaurants, said Mark Plumlee, its senior content manager. From April 1 to May 16 of this year, the total number of scans fell by about 27 percent compared to the same period in 2021.
Fewer restaurants are making new QR menus, he said. And about 75 percent of their existing QR codes are essentially dormant, with less than 90 views in the last year. (Half had fewer than five.)
“It’s not like people delete their QR codes when they’re done using them,” Mr Plumlee wrote in an email. “They just stop.”
The menus are still widely used in pubs, beer gardens and casual food stores where speed in ordering and paying is a priority, said Kristen Hawley, the founder of Expedite, a restaurant technology newsletter.
But for restaurants that deploy them primarily for pandemic hygiene reasons, she said, “It’s gone.”
The motivation for the U-turn is simple, restaurateurs said: Diners just hate QR code menus.
“They’re almost universally disliked,” Ms Hawley said.
One reason is etiquette. Everyone knows it’s rude to bring a phone to a table, but that’s what a digital menu requires. And making a special request for a paper menu is difficult. Nobody wants to be That Guy.
Another drawback of the coded menu is the feel. As the pandemic fades, restaurants are trying to get people to eat out, and the temptation of a dining room is part of the get–dimmed candlelight and uninterrupted eye-to-eye conversation. A QR code can kill the mood: phones on, blue lights on, socializing off.
“The bottom line is: the QR code is the antithesis of romance,” said Richard Boccato, the owner of Dutch Kills Bar in Long Island City, Queens. “It hinders communication and it hinders intimacy.”
The bar dropped its coded menus in summer 2021, “the moment it was OK for us to go back to a proper menu,” he said. His main objection to them? “A menu is a window to the soul of the restaurant and a QR code has no soul.”
It also remains a mystery to many tech-averse diners. “Many of our customers were like, ‘What is this? I don’t know how to use it,” said Luly Valls, a third-generation owner of Versailles, Miami’s famed Cuban restaurant. ‘They’re older. They were like, ‘Give me a paper menu.’”
Waiters often bear the brunt of the frustration. “The server becomes like an ordering robot,” said Jill Weber, the founder and CEO of Sojourn Philly, a Philadelphia restaurant group.
Some servers said that QR menus take the fun out of work. “There’s something inhuman about it,” says Alec Moran, a waiter at a posh Italian restaurant in Chicago, who he declined to name for fear of jeopardizing his job. Customers, he said, “pay less attention to you as the human does to them, and are more focused on the phone screen.”
Mr Moran said he can no longer rely on visual cues from guests. It used to be that guests put their menu down when they were ready to order. Now their phones are still on the table, still off.
“The world is becoming more digitized every day,” said Mr. Moran. “It felt like restaurants were one of the few analogue public spaces we have left.”
Mr Moran said he thought QR codes also made customers less likely to order desserts, another glass of wine or some of “those little extras you can stick on the bill”. It’s just annoying to re-scroll, he said.
Michele Baker Benesch, the president of Menu Men, which designs, prints and produces menus, said when her customers went back to paper menus, “the check per person went up. People don’t want to use their phones anymore, especially for dessert.”
And customers, she added, may be reluctant to order anything expensive. “It’s really hard to order a $70 steak with a QR code — or a $200 bottle of wine. It just doesn’t feel right.”
Darden Restaurants, owner of the Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse chains, used QR codes at the start of the pandemic. But the restaurants returned to physical menus in fall 2021 “based on guest feedback,” Rich Jeffers, the senior director of communications, wrote in an email.
Benjamin Claeys, the CEO of Menu Tiger, a global provider of QR menu software, said the company was aware of the backlash against the menus.
Still, he said, more dynamic QR code menus that allow a customer to order and pay without waiting for a server are gaining popularity. In the first quarter of this year, the number of companies signing up and actively using the service grew 37.6 percent from the last quarter of 2022, he said.
“Our own customer data shows that menus with QR codes are indispensable.”
Digital ordering services can be costly for restaurants. Many services offer a free QR code menu as part of a broader management package, which can cost as much as $50 to $100 per month. (Paper menus can also be expensive, though prices vary depending on factors such as the type of paper and number of pages.)
Ms. Valls took over QR menus at Versailles in Miami early in the pandemic. But when she reintroduced traditional menus next door, customers only asked for paper. So a few months ago she canceled her QR subscription.
“If we only had QR codes all the time, it would be a huge savings,” she said. “But we always had to have both, so we still had to spend money making actual menus.”
But some restaurateurs see benefits in using QR menus, especially when dealing with language barriers.
Nom Wah, the restaurant group behind the famous dim sum restaurant of the same name in Manhattan’s Chinatown, knows that not all of its customers or servers are fluent in English. At the Chinatown location, there’s a QR code on the table that links to a menu with pictures, and a paper menu with pencils to check off your order.
“I have a photo menu so no one asks questions,” says Barbara Leung, the group’s head of marketing and operations. “It just eliminates the room for error or miscommunication.”
In some restaurants, QR codes scroll to the end of the meal.
At Bar Meridian in Brooklyn, diners order a paper menu. The check comes with a QR code, in case they just want to pay on their phone and leave.
While Sage Geyer, the owner, believes dinner table phones are “conversation killers,” he said they can be useful at the end of the meal.
“Maybe you have other plans. You may want to get away from this date. You may want to go home with this date,” he said. “Whatever you want to do, convenience is number one.”
