Read the menu

I read menus the way some people read balance sheets. Not for what to order. For what the place has decided about itself.

Ninety seconds is enough.

Count the items. A menu that runs past a hundred dishes is a restaurant that has not chosen a customer and is hoping the customer will do the choosing. Somewhere in that list is the kitchen's real strength, buried between a pasta nobody has ordered since the opening and a burger that exists because a competitor has one.

Look at where the eye lands. The dish in the box, the one with the photograph, the one at the top right. That is what they need you to buy, which is not always what they are best at. Margin lives in the box. Reputation lives wherever the regulars order from, and the two are rarely on the same page.

Read the prices against the room. A menu that costs more than the chairs is a positioning problem, and it shows up long before it shows up in the reviews.

Read the language. "Signature" on eleven items means nothing is a signature. A description that takes four lines to say "chicken" is compensating for something.

Then notice what is missing. No prices is a statement. No Arabic in Riyadh is a statement. No children's section in Jeddah on a Friday is a statement, and probably not the one they meant to make.

The brand deck took three months and a workshop. The menu was printed on a Tuesday, and it is the only document the customer will ever read.

If you want to know a restaurant's strategy, do not ask for the deck. Ask for the menu, and read it as though it were the deck.