Menus Without Prices.

Restaurant Rants One: Are the prices missing so you are in the restaurant blind? Or are the prices so high that they are blinding?

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Guest Contributor ~ Charles G. Thompson/Substack: The Sharpest Tool

Jeremiah Tower’s comments are in italics.

Too many restaurants are posting menus online without prices. I like to see what I might have to pay before venturing out to a place I’ve not visited. The internet has now made it a requirement that restaurants have a website or some type of digital presence. Most consumers expect this to be the case. Now diners can peek at what’s in store before their actual dinner date. They can decide if the prices are within a comfortable affordability range. And most of us look at these sites. That wasn’t always the case.

Jeremiah: You have boarded a plane and are taxiing out onto the runway when there’s an announcement that your ticket costs $650. This is the first time you have heard of it. No chance to leave for another airline.

You are greeted in a famous restaurant and taken to your table. After a glass of champagne, you ask for a menu. “The chef insists that you have the tasting menu. It is $325 per person.” And that is the first you have heard of that. You’re in the same position as on the plane. You could leave, but where can you find another unoccupied, unreserved table at the last minute?

This happened to me in New York at Per Se several years ago. I had researched the menu and was looking forward to what I’d made as preliminary choices. A la Carte. My choices.

As I am writing this, I looked at the restaurant website to see what menu prices are like now. “New menu page coming soon,” it said. No prices either. On Google it told me that the tasting menu is now $425, but no mention of the food itself. So at least $500 per person, and who knows what wild tipping policies they have?

Going in mostly blind.

A Tradition Begins

At age nine my mother started a tradition for my birthday that lasted through my high school years. On my actual birthday, I was allowed to choose a restaurant to go to for a ‘fancy’ meal. At this point I don’t remember why I wanted this, but I really, really did. (Maybe from watching The Galloping Gourmet and Julia Child on T.V.?) Going to a restaurant in this fashion was a real splurge for my mother. We were lower middle class, and she was a single mother raising two children. Money was not falling off trees in our world. Of course, looking over the menu at all the yummy possibilities was one of the more exciting aspects of this experience.

That first fancy meal was also my first time spying the most expensive dishes on the menu. In those days, it would likely be steak or lobster. If she’d let me, I’d order whatever was priciest. From that first meal, I became known for ordering the most expensive item on the menu.

Jeremiah: For the first 20 years of my life while traveling, it was my father’s corporate expense account that paid for First Class, smoked salmon at every meal for me, and extra aged rum for my babas au rhum that had to be dessert. When it wasn’t a special-order Baked Alaska.

When we were off the account and my father was paying, it came with a reminder “No smoked salmon tonight.”

I countered that with a loud voice to the waiter for all to hear, “May I have a half portion of salmon.” That was enough to embarrass my father into a full portion and a big tip to the server.

To Splurge or Not?

To this day, the most expensive dishes on a menu are the ones I look for first. Then I argue with myself on whether to splurge or not. The point here is that we didn’t always have the luxury of looking at a website menu before we arrived at a restaurant.

I have noticed an uptick in the practice of posting menus online sans prices ever since COVID. I see it more and more, and it’s highly annoying. My husband and I are financially sound. We enjoy the occasional ‘fancy’ meal out a few times a month. I’m in charge of keeping a list of places to try. The procedure used to be that I would pick a place and look at their website. A.) to see what they offered, and B.) to look at the prices. We both know our financial boundaries; a splurge is one thing. A break-the-bank is another thing entirely (for example, the recent Noma L.A. pop up at $1500 each would fall under bank breaker). With the advent of the internet and online menus, my husband loves to decide before we go what he’s going to order. At times, he’ll have two choices in mind. It’s now become a family joke, as I much prefer the element of surprise. Or at least waiting to really study the menu when we are in situ.

It took me a minute to figure a work around to missing menu prices: Google/AI. the name of the restaurant but don’t go to the restaurant site. Look at the other results, maybe on Yelp, etc. Invariably someone who has already been to the restaurant has posted a photo of the actual menu (that includes those missing prices). Apparently, I’m not alone in this practice. There are endless Reddit threads on the subject. Eater also covered this topic: Dear Expensive Restaurants: Stop Posting Online Menus Without Prices. It’s not only high-end restaurants who have adopted this practice. I wanted to try a new burrito place the other day. Yep, when I went to the website, there were no prices listed.

Menus: Typed Up & Photocopied

A quick return to the before times. I remember the days at Stars, Jeremiah’s San Francisco brasserie, when we typed up menus and photocopied them.

Jeremiah: This one below was a pre-opening lunch for the newly formed American Institute of Wine and Food. And somehow the Beef Council who had been persuaded that veal sweetbreads were all the beef necessary.

This happened daily as Jeremiah and his chefs changed the menu depending on what was fresh and available.

It was often a mad rush to take the stack of menus up to the host stand before service commenced. He reminded me how on Sundays, they had a second menu printed and stuffed into covers within minutes in case one of the dishes was no longer available.

Jeremiah: I knew what we would run out of. I also knew I never wanted to hear a server at a table or the bar saying, “I’m sorry but that is no longer available.” So new complete menus, without any items missing, were prepared.

This one is from 11 months after we opened July 4^th, 1984.

Jeremiah: Nothing 86’d included. And for the wine list the same. It was made up of small pages. If two or more items were missing from a page, it could be redone and inserted so that no one ever knew. Don’t you hate it went the server has been back to your table two or three times with the same story--that the wine you want is not in the house?

For the special and additional wine list for that day only. It could be, like the food menu, typed, printed, and stuffed into covers in an hour.

Restaurant Guides: Zagat, Michelin (and Critics)

I had to think back too to remember how we used to decide to try a new place. And it came to me: restaurant guides like Zagat and Michelin. They listed price ranges and suggested dishes to order. When I lived in New York, I always had a Zagat guide. There were also restaurant reviews which I still love to read. Those were the heady days of critics like Mimi Sheraton, Gayle Greene (and her hats), Ruth Reichl, Bryan Miller, and in Los Angeles, S. Irene Virbila and Jonathan Gold (and Ruth Reichl too!). Yes, they usually listed price ranges and favorite dishes. When Bryan Miller was the New York Times restaurant critic, I was lucky enough to go with him as he reviewed a couple of new places. I was friends with his wife.

And let’s not forget those menus posted in restaurant windows. A common practice to this day in cities like Paris, Rome, Madrid, and London. You’re out and about and hunger pangs come on? Take a look at café and restaurant menus and choose one to dine at. Of course, it happens in the States as well, a bit less frequently. Jeremiah reminded me of the glass enclosed wooden box outside Chez Panisse where he was chef. Each night of the week the restaurant served a different menu; the menu posted outside the restaurant listed the menus for one week. It went up every Friday morning. Walking through the Gourmet Ghetto on your way to the Cheese Board? Stop and peek at what’s in store for the week at Chez Panisse. Jeremiah continued this practice at Stars by posting the daily menu at the restaurant’s entrance.

We do offer a caveat here at Out of the Oven: we understand how difficult it is to operate a restaurant right now. The instability of just about everything, the high prices for rent and for material goods, it’s a difficult moment to own a restaurant. Yet, if there’s one take away from this, it’s that we fully support restaurants and those hard-working people operating them. In that spirit, our suggestion is, one way to encourage diners to visit an establishment might be to post prices on websites. No surprises and no angry customers.

Is part of the problem a decline in customer service? Has the public been trained to accept less? Everything feels more difficult. Try to cancel memberships to anything, like Uber One, You Tube, or Amazon Prime. Or attempt to reach, say, the Social Security office, or other agencies involving our own money. It can be headache producing. Viewing restaurant menus should be a cinch.

Biography – Charles G. Thompson

In my early employment years, I worked in the restaurant business as a cook first before moving to the front of the house. As luck would have it, I was employed in three of Jeremiah’s restaurants--Santa Fe Bar & Grill, Stars and 690. A friendship with Jeremiah began then and has lasted to this day. I’ve not been part of the hospitality industry for many years. Now, I’m a writer. My writing has appeared in Wired, Advocate, Washington Post, Business Insider, Los Angeles Times, The Independent (U.K.), Chicago Tribune, among others.