There is something mildly frustrating about opening a restaurant menu and immediately feeling like you need a translator just to figure out what you are ordering for lunch. The item names are written in one language, the section headers follow suit, and then somewhere at the bottom of each entry, buried under the atmosphere, there is finally a description in English. It is not the language itself that is the issue. It is the feeling that the presentation is designed more to impress than to welcome.
I get it. There is a case to be made for authenticity. A restaurant leaning into its cultural identity is not doing anything wrong on its face. But there is a difference between honoring a culinary tradition and making a diner feel like an outsider before they have even ordered a glass of water. When the barrier to entry is the menu itself, something has gone sideways in the hospitality equation.
And look, I will be the first to admit I have had to check my own assumptions when traveling abroad. Early on, I carried that very common expectation that the world would just accommodate me wherever I went. I had to unlearn that. When you are a guest in someone else’s country, their customs are not an inconvenience. They are the point. I learned that, and I respect it.
But a local restaurant is a different situation. You are not a tourist navigating a foreign city. You are a customer trying to decide between two dishes on a Tuesday night. If your menu makes that harder than it needs to be, you are not creating an experience. You are creating friction. And for a lot of people, friction is enough reason to close the tab and look somewhere else.
Maybe I am being too hard on it. Or maybe menus, like everything else in hospitality, work best when they make people feel like they belong rather than like they missed something.
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