When the menu is on the cellphone, some diners get cranky. Miami-Dade’s QR-code backlash
Some diners are fed up with restaurants only offering menus visible by cellphone through QR codes, and one county commissioner wants to require that another choice is available.
Eileen Higgins, a MiamiDade County commissioner, wants state permission to enact local rules requiring restaurants to offer paper menus as an option for patrons who don’t want to peer at digital screens in deciding what to order.
“Children are left out. Older people are left out,” said Higgins, whose district includes Brickell Avenue and South Beach, two of Miami’s most popular dining destinations. “There’s no reason for that. Dining out should feel really welcoming.”
For now, Higgins can only advocate for printed menus. Florida prohibits local governments from regulating how restaurants market food, leaving that power to the state. She has proposed legislation asking the Florida Legislature to modify that law to allow counties to require printed menus.
“This board wishes to allow all customers the freedom to choose a menu that works for them,” the resolution states.
The Higgins legislation touches on a prickly topic as an innovation that spread quickly at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic shows no signs of receding now that health precautions have mostly ended.
“Once you pull your phone out at the table it’s disruptive to interacting with people you’re with. And that’s the whole point of going out to eat.,” said Patrick Dwyer, 54, a wealth advisor who is from South Beach and said he’s frequently requesting printed menus at restaurants where the QR option is all that’s offered.
“It’s hard to read,” he said. “It’s a bad service model.”
The debate centers on the rapid adaptation of Quick Response Code menus — typically a graphic placed on a table that sends users to an online after once a cellphone camera is aimed at the image.
RESTAURANT ADVANTAGE
There are advantages for the restaurant: no need to print menus or worry about stains or keeping them sanitary, plus the ability to change offerings easily when a limited-edition beer runs out or mangoes are in season.
The Higgins legislation doesn’t aim to ban QR-code menus. Instead, it advocates requiring that printed menus always be available.
That’s the strategy that Harry Coleman landed on after briefly considering a shift to online-only menus at his Smoke and Dough restaurant in West Kendall.
“My wife and I talk about it all the time. When we go out to eat in Wynwood or Coral Gables, nobody has menus,” he said.
While Smoke and Dough tables have QR codes, servers still hand out printed versions to keep customers happy.
“People get really upset when we don’t have [enough] menus,” Coleman said. “If we tell people the
updated menu is on the QR code, they look at you funny.”
For Higgins to advance her proposal, the Democrat in a nonpartisan seat would need backing by the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature.
One sympathetic local representative, Vicki Lopez, a Republican representing District 113, sees printed menus as vital for her district, which includes Little Havana and other Miami neighborhoods popular with older residents.
“Some of them don’t have phones,” Lopez said. “Some who do aren’t as good with these applications.”
Still, Lopez said she’s not ready to back Miami-Dade requiring paper menus. “I would like to bring it to people’s attention,” she
said. “I don’t necessarily want to make anything mandatory.”
Elizabeth Goings, a Miami lawyer, said she has seen too many older dining companions frustrated or discouraged by cellphone menus. “People in their 90s want to order for themselves. They don’t want to be babied,” said Goings, 54. Recalling her time working at Shoney’s in the 1980s, Goings said sometimes the outdated ways still make sense.
“Go back to just a laminated menu,” she said,
“and you just wipe them off.”