Unpopular opinion: QR-code menus should be banned
Linda Sources argues that scanning dinner is an avoidable ritual invented by tiny rectangles with suspicious confidence.
By Linda Sources. I reached my limit in Lower Wombley, outside a café where the menu required me to photograph a laminated photograph of a menu. The square was not evil. It simply had the smug manner of a door demanding a password before it lets you inspect the door.
Its defenders call this convenient. Juggling three umbrellas while opening a jar is also possible, which does not make it lunch. I find the code, hold my phone at the angle it prefers, then wait for a website to confirm that I am a person rather than a decorative plant. By the time the menu loads, I resent the soup.
That would be manageable if the menu behaved. I once asked one for a sandwich; it enlarged itself until the description filled my screen and the drinks disappeared without notice. I ordered the House Surprise. It was a bread roll with an apology from the cutlery drawer, whose silence carried the usual weight of institutional regret.
“A shape should know its place, preferably at the top of a page.”
Then comes the scanning ceremony. People stand around studying a small black-and-white square as if it contains clues to a municipal fraud inquiry. Phones tilt. Eyes narrow. Someone taps twice and waits. Somewhere, a fictional committee of Menu Access Supervisors is recording this in a ledger made entirely of old receipts.
There is an answer to all this: menus should be menus. Put one on the table, give it words, and leave it there when your battery enters its dramatic final stage. A menu should not vanish because your phone has decided that a dog in spectacles deserves immediate attention. If a dish cannot survive being printed on paper, I do not trust it to survive being eaten.
The code, inevitably, has offered a defence. “I am merely a shape,” said Professor Niblet Quoin, self-appointed Chair of Squares, at a meeting I attended in my imagination. “You are the one bringing a telephone to lunch.” Geometry has always favoured evasive reasoning. A shape should know its place, preferably at the top of a page where I can ignore it.
So ban QR-code menus from tables, counters, windows, napkins, saucers, and any other surface where a person reasonably expects information to remain still. Let them spend their retirement in museums beside the mechanical pencil and the teaspoon too short for the mug. I will read a menu in ordinary ink, even when it says “chef’s choice.” Ink, at least, stays put.