I want to start by saying I had a nice evening, and that I am calm.
Last Friday was my wedding anniversary. My wife and I went to a restaurant we have been going to for 19 years, a place with tablecloths and a bread basket and, until recently, menus. We sat down at 6:30 p.m. at our usual table. There was a candle, and there was a little plastic stand holding a square, about 2 inches across, made of tiny black and white boxes, under which someone had written, in a friendly font, “Scan for menu.”
Our server came over. His name was Tanner. Tanner asked if we had “had a chance to look at the code.” I told Tanner that I had looked at it, and that it had not looked back.
I am not a man who is afraid of his phone. I have a phone. I use it to make calls and to check the time, which I then confirm with my watch. So I took out my phone and pointed it at the square. The phone opened a website. The website asked me to accept cookies. I said no, twice. The website told me that by continuing I had accepted the cookies, and I want it noted that I did not continue. I was taken there.
Then the menu loaded, and it was the size of a postage stamp, and the first item on it was a photograph of a cocktail that cost $19 and was on fire.
I asked Tanner whether there was a paper menu. Tanner said everything was “on the code.” I asked whether he could bring me a menu anyway, for an old customer, on an anniversary. And Tanner, who I believe was trying to help, went into the back and returned with a larger copy of the square, printed on a full sheet of paper.
I DID NOT ASK FOR A BIGGER CODE, TANNER.
I apologize. That was not a nice way to talk on an anniversary. I am calm.
I want to be clear about what a menu is. A menu is a promise. A square is a square. With a menu, you can see everything the kitchen is willing to do for you, all at once, on one piece of heavy paper that someone wiped down with a rag. You can point at a menu. YOU CANNOT POINT AT A SQUARE. I TRIED. TANNER WATCHED ME TRY.
Fine.
I reached Ron Gilchrist, senior spokesperson for the Department of Agricultural Common Sense, to ask whether the government had a position on menus that cannot be held. He told me that the nation’s soybean outlook remains steady through the third quarter and that the department continues to monitor the corn. I asked him again about the menu. He told me that the department does not regulate restaurants but that it had recently replaced its own lobby sign with a square, and that visitors have been standing in front of it for some time. He declined to comment further.
In the end I ordered the third thing on the list, because I could read the third thing. It was a salmon. I don’t care for salmon. My wife had the chicken, which she found on the second scroll. She said the evening was lovely, and that I should “let the square go.” I love my wife, and we have been married 31 years, and I have not let the square go.
So here is my proposal, and I believe it is modest. I am not asking restaurants to give up their squares. I am asking only that every restaurant in the nation be required, by law, to keep one paper menu on the premises, laminated, attached to the host stand by a small chain, the way a bank keeps its pen. One menu. A man could walk up to it and read it and walk back to his table and order. It would be a public menu. It would belong to all of us.
In the meantime I have written out the restaurant’s menu by hand, from memory, the way it was in 2019, on two sheets of notebook paper, and I bring it with me. Last night I handed it to Tanner and ordered the pot roast from it. They have not served pot roast in seven years. Tanner went into the back for a long time. When he came out, he said the kitchen was “looking into it.”
My blood pressure on Monday was 133 over 87. Last week it was 132 over 86. The nurse took it with a cuff that was connected to a tablet, and before it would show me the number, it asked me to scan a square.