Clean for whom

On the delivery apps in Riyadh, plenty of small kitchens have cut their listings back to the picture. A bowl of hummus shot from above, a ring of olive oil, a pinch of paprika. A price in riyals. A plus sign.

The line of grey type under each dish, saying what is in it, usually goes first. It looks busy, and the thinking is that nobody reads it.

Which nobody, though? Most people thumbing through forty kitchens late at night never get past the photograph. Most are not about to order either. They are passing the time until somebody else in the house decides.

The person who is about to order reads everything. Some nights she is a mother whose son is allergic to sesame, looking at a clean page from a small Lebanese kitchen. She needs to know whether the falafel is rolled in seeds, whether there is tahini in the marinade, whether the bread goes out with za'atar on it. The photograph cannot say. The clean listing does not try.

So she screenshots it, sends it to her sister, and spends twenty minutes collecting guesses.

A friend sends back a different listing, from a kitchen in the next district. It looks worse. Under every dish there is a line of grey type, and at the bottom, in plain words, which dishes carry sesame and which are made away from it. She does not need any of it made easy. She needs it to be there.

She orders from that one, and saves the listing.

The first kitchen made its page simple for people who were never going to be customers, and lost the one who was. The second wrote for the person who cared enough to read, and let everyone else scroll past.