Status Report on Restaurant Menu Slowness
Someone takes longer choosing food in person because app filters quietly became part of decision making.
The restaurant had paper menus. This was known in advance. The reservation was made anyway.
The subject had been to restaurants before 2020. Many restaurants. This particular one, twice. The menu was familiar in a general sense. The subject knew what kind of food it served. There was no reason for the degree of consideration that the menu then required.
The menu required six minutes.
This was an observation, not a complaint. Six minutes is not an eternity. Six minutes at a table with a friend who is also reading the menu is unremarkable. The subject found it remarkable anyway.
What Changed
Two years of ordering through an app had introduced a set of tools the physical menu did not offer. The app had filters. Rating scores. Delivery time estimates that served as a proxy for popularity. Photos of every item, rendered in controlled lighting, curated by someone whose job it was to make the food look like the food.
The paper menu had names. Some items had descriptions. The descriptions were optimistic.
The subject had become, without noticing it, a filtered-search person attempting to operate a browse-only interface.
The First Consequence
The first case of restaurant menu slowness changes one small decision without being discussed. The subject starts at the top of the menu, reads to the bottom, and then returns to the top because the comparison function has no clear output. Everything is eligible. Nothing ranks itself.
In the app, the recommended section exists. It has done the ranking.
The Second Consequence
After repetition, other people begin adjusting their behavior around restaurant menu slowness. The friend across the table has been ready for four minutes and is doing a creditable job of not showing it. An unspoken rule forms: the person who takes longer to order gets to go first. This is polite. It is also faster.
The Third Consequence
Eventually restaurant menu slowness acquires an unwritten enforcement system that everyone denies creating. The subject now scans restaurant menus online the night before a booking. This is described as research. It reduces table time. Nobody asked for the reduction; nobody objected to it.
The Underlying Structure
The event was wanted and often enjoyed, yet recovery from it is treated like a separate appointment. The restaurant meal in 2022 carries a faint weight of reentry cost that the meal in 2019 did not carry. The food is the same. The room is the same. The ambient noise of other diners is the same, but it registers differently now that it has been absent for a period.
Social recovery time must be hidden inside the calendar because wanting people and needing rest are treated as opposites. The subject wanted to come. The subject is glad to be here. The subject has quietly set aside tomorrow morning.
The dal was excellent. The ordering took six minutes. Both of these things are true.