Goodbye Paper Menus? Restaurants Test The Water For Tablets
When you sit down at Chef Jos Andrs' tapas restaurant, Jaleo, in Washington, D.C., and ask to see the beverage options, as I did recently, you're in for a surprise. Instead of a traditional leather-bound menu, I was handed an iPad.
An app called SmartCellar guided me to search for wine by grape variety and climate zone. Selecting a bottle, I got details about the vintage and its producers, tasting notes written by the restaurant's wine team, pictures of the bottle or label, and food pairing suggestions.
Having all this information on hand was initially intimidating. What was I in the mood for? Did I want to splurge on a rare bottle from the illustrious, shuttered Spanish restaurant El Bulli? What was the back story on that Rioja? But as I immersed myself in the app, I got so into it that the waiter had to stop by three times before I was ready to order.
While paper menus, which have been around for centuries, still dominate the restaurant world, a growing number of restaurants are singing the praises of tablets to better serve their customers.
"There's a clear advantage to digital menus," says Lucas Paya, wine director for Jos Andrs' ThinkFoodGroup, which has been testing them at two of the company's 16 restaurants since 2012. "First, there's the amount of content you can display, which is impossible on paper. And there's the real-time capability. I can update the list at a moment's notice online from anywhere in the world."
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