Visual food menus - Do restaurants menus need to evolve?

One of my pet-peeves about restaurants, especially fine dining restaurants is the lack of visual displays on their menus. Sometimes the consumer needs some help to visualize the food before they can make a decision; this is especially so when menu items include rare and uncommon ingredients. I have toyed with this idea for many months at my own pasta restaurant and there are significant advantages to add pictures and convert restaurant menus into visual ones.

I am not saying businesses should scatter a flurry of photos all over their menus, but rather utilize photos and illustrations to effectively explain their food in a tasteful manner.

Beautiful visual menus at casual and high-end restaurants in Tokyo and Kanazawa

From my experience developing a visual menu:

1. Speeds up the consumer decision process Customers can, almost immediately, zero in onto the food items they desire. This really saves time, during the ordering process. Little is left to imagination and the consumer gets what he/she orders if the photo is not over exaggerated. The less time customers spend thinking means the restaurants will have more time to turn tables.
2. Increases service staff productivity One of the biggest problems I faced when running a pure pasta restaurant was having to explain what each dish was to my customers. “what is in this pasta” or “how do the noodles look like” were questions asked on a daily basis. Creating the visual menu rendered these questions redundant and enabled my wait staff to continue with their work more efficiently.
3. Manages customer expectations With a what-you-see-is-what-you-get style menu customers know exactly what they will be getting. I've learnt very early that a purely contextual menu can be a double-edge sword, and it all boils down to presentation. Customers can be delighted or very disappointed when the food arrives.

My first purely visual menu

So should every restaurant change their menu’s to a visual one? Personally, while I like the concept of a fully visual food & beverage world, I really doubt the higher-end restaurants would bite into this concept; especially so if they have seasonal or tasting menus which change very often.

So I’d encourage more casual dining establishments with somewhat fixed menus to go visual! Even fine-dining restaurants might want to consider keeping a nice visual-menu on hand for those hard-to-handle customers.

Left (non-visual) Centre (partially visual) Right (fully visual)
How my menu evolved over time.

One last consideration about visual menu’s is that restaurants really need to do it right; there’s no point to have a visual menu if the photos are tremendously better than the actual food or vice versa. So remember keep it real and your customers will thank you.

Are visual menus the menus of the future? How would you react if there were more photos on restaurant menus?