Researching a restaurant’s menu online, I was confronted with the picture below. Maybe it’s my septuagenarian eyes, but…just no. I would need a pen and notebook to whittle it down to dishes that appealed to me. Now I’m curious about the topic of menus with poor visual designs.
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For years, one of our regular haunts used a very unusual font which made it difficult to read. I’d love to show you what I meant but they changed it a few months back to something more “normal”.
And , no, I don’t like the look of your example. Put some line spacing in there!
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An additional carriage return (how’s THAT for “old-time” typing talk?) would help greatly with this menu. Lots of wasted space in the " | " parts. I had to look for the prices to figure out where each appetizer ended.
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What’s “CBGF”? The menu is definitely different, but I’ve seen worse.
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I manage application developer teams and accessibility is a big thing for our (federal) clients. That font is fairly low on the accessibility scale. In particular, what looks like a capital “i” instead of the number 1 (one). But I doubt restaurants care much about accessibility.
Also, line spacing as noted by others.
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I don’t see what’s wrong that menu.
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I think it is “Can Be Gluten Free”
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Wow! Color me impressed!
Natascha aka the Acronym Qween 
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just stripping out all the extraneous words and spending two minutes on line spacing yields a much more digestible version IMO.
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Me, too.
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Their “designer” needs an introduction to usability heuristics.
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Greatly improved, IMO.
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I think menus like this are done with deliberately bad design. It’s a thing. The font looks like some version of monospace Courrier , aka a “typewriter” font. Monospace fonts are great for programming and ascii art. But this menu isn’t getting typed. It’s displayed on the screen or it printed from a document on a screen. It’s designed that way to give the impression of being ‘hand done’ or lo-tech or otherwise marked as ‘artisanal’. It tries to convey the message that this restaurant is somehow more ‘honest’, less polished for public consumption. “Oh, no fancy leather bound menus here. We type a new one up every day!” (regardless of if they do or not).
Now, it doesn’t always work. And sometimes, like in this case, the poor layout becomes an actual impediment to your guests’ comfort.
But I see what they were going for. It’s a trend, no better but no worse than the hipster _____ & ______-named restaurant with the Edison bulb lighting and hard steel benches.
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Computer fonts cannot create typeset ligatures. It’s interesting that design composition for screens and design composition for print actually diverge. I suspect most people don’t even know this. It’s a real problem with OCR if you are using a scan of a printed book to work with (oh ask me how I know). Those ligatures also make reading easier. TMI, but …If I can’t read a menu, why would I want to eat food that perhaps was as thoughtlessly prepared? It’s the little things that set me off. 
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OR it’s designed to be irritating AF, intentionally or not.
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Script and “fancy pen”’ is much worse but I agree menus should be the easiest part of the experience.
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once upon a time in a galaxy far far away . . . .
it was thought ‘the internet’ would improve the human condition by light-year-leaps-and-bounds because “everything would be current on-line”
well, that failed. in my experience on-line menus are accurate about 20% of the time.
me: “I don’t see the xxx”
them: “Oh, our menu changed - yeah about six weeks ago . . .”
and, as anyone in the practice knows . . . those ‘automatic’ html converters , , ,
are proven dreadfully terrible.
font subs, symbol subs, CRLF/LF conversions . . . . tabs en-rampage . . .
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When I am King Of The World (sometime around the next upcoming February 30th), all printed and published items shall be in Arial font.
But I also agree that I don’t really want to go on a scavenger hunt to figure out what an offered dish is supposed to be.
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Do we get a vote? If so, you have mine.
That said, I think one of our recently disgraced Prime Ministers had a childhood ambition to be World King and look where that’s got him so far. 
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