rule

If they design the online menu well, I'm all for it. In theory, an online only menu should improve the quality of the menu, by making it much easier to keep it up to date (eg, there should never be an "ask your server what the soup of the day is" in an online menu -- update that you lazy schmucks) and it's also easier for them to have pictures.

The fact that not every food item has pictures drives me crazy. Show me what the dang food looks like. Unless it's something you never sell, it's so dang easy to get a picture when someone orders it. I don't want a fake picture anyway; I want the pictures to be representative of how it will really look. With physical menus, it's understandable because printing is so expensive and pictures would make the menu extra long. Online menus don't have that issue or excuse.

But yeah, if their online menu is gonna be a mediocre PDF copy of their former print menus clearly designed for 8x11 or whatever, it's a downright worse experience using a digital menu. That's the case for a shocking number of restaurants I've been at. You'd think mobile devices are some new fangled fad or something, cause they sure don't think mobile is something someone will view their menu on.

I think my real complaint is that I'm using my data to pay them more money for services they should already be offering customers. It feels like we might as well end with a step-by-step self-cooking restaurant and we pay them to cook the food ourselves.

That and it's usually hosted off some slow ass, janky website where I hit refresh three times to get all the assets to load without timing out.

"Uhh, yes, I'll have the 404 not found, dressing on the side, with a 504 gateway timeout, medium rare. Oh, and could we get a round of 500 internal server error for the table, please?"