Restaurant menus are everywhere. But we know little about how they work. In May We Suggest, Alison Pearlman investigates how they try (and sometimes fail) to influence what we buy, how we dine, and how we feel about both.

Follow the author as she visits restaurants of all types throughout the greater Los Angeles area and asks: How does a menu’s size, structure, imagery, language, materials, and pricing dictate what we buy or how we compose a meal? Does a fine-dining table menu try to hook us the same way as a signboard over a fast-food counter or a mobile-ordering app? What convinces us that one menu has enough choice and another too much or not enough? Along the way, Pearlman shows how menus of differing styles operate. She also uncovers what rhetoric works when, where, and why.

No book about restaurant menus is quite like this. It defines restaurant menus in a newly expansive way, considering spoken variants and displays of real food, not just sheets of paper and signboards. The analysis draws on an unprecedented range of disciplines, from experience design to behavioral economics. It is also the first study to examine how menus don’t persuade alone, but cooperate with restaurant décor, service, and other merchandising devices in the restaurant theater.