If you watch food shows on TV you’ll observe a common characteristic of the better chefs. They abide by the KISS philosophy (keep it simple, stupid). On competitive shows (Top Chef, Iron Chef etc.) the judges typically prefer the dish with fewer ingredients that’s masterfully prepared to the one that tries to develop complex flavors and suffers from under or over cooking. When you eat at the restaurant of one of these chefs you can tell, simplicity rules. The décor may be elegant or modern, but its never cluttered. Whatever is on the table (glasses, sliverware, dishes, candle etc.) typically has clean lines. Even the garnishes on the plate serve a purpose, lend a flavor, are meant to be eaten and are considered part of the experience. A big faux pas are garnishes that do nothing, but take up space, like the top of a pineapple. When the rules of simplicity are violated its noticed by the partrons, even if we cant always define it. Virginia wrote about The Studio in Hilton Head, SC and mentioned the space as being like someone’s funky living room. It was awkward. Too complex. And it distracts from the food.
So, given that the world’s best chefs seem to agree that simplicity is best when it comes to the food they serve and the restaurants they build, why, for the love of god, do they not abide by this when designing their web sites? Why do I have to wait 30 seconds for a flash web page to pan from a school of fish to an island sunset to the skyline of NYC (Le Bernardin) or for the left to right visual progression of Thomas Keller’s vision of bringing French Laundry to NY? Seriously, I lived through the dial-up era and am glad to have fast internet access now. One of the things I’ve become accustomed to is pages loading quickly. And don’t tell me there’s a “skip intro” link.
Besides the waiting, the sites are then hard to use. Go check today’s dinner menu at the Jean-Georges website. Find it? Were you able to navigate to it without the page constantly flashing at you as you highlight the names of the 29 restaurants you didn’t go to check up on? Oh, I should have mentioned, don’t try to check these sites on your mobile phone, like when you’re at happy hour with coworkers and are trying to convince one of them to take his girlfriend to Masa: your phone doesn’t support flash. Pretty inconvenient, huh? And non-functional. A big no-no in the cooking world, is somehow okay with how they present their restaurants in a medium that nowadays, lets face it, is going to be the customer’s first impression.
I’m not saying Flash serves no purpose online. There are plenty of sites that should be using flash, for instance a the homepage of a web-design firm that tries to convince restaurants to hire them. Or a site hosting flash-games (my favorite time-waster is free-kick fusion). But restaurants, not necessary. When I show up for my reservation do you make me watch a laser-light show before you’ll seat me? Does the coat check girl come out to dance and sing the overture to Oklahoma? No. Then why are you forcing me to watch these things when I visit your website?
I visited the website for all six three-star Michelin restaurants in the US (PerSe, Le Bernardin, Masa, Jean-Georges, French Laundry, and Joel Robuchon in Las Vegas), every single one requires flash, has a longer-than-necessary intro and is hard to use. To verify the phenomenon is not uniquely American, I also went to the websites for each of the world’s ten best restaurants. Nine of them are flash-based. Funny enough, the one that isn’t, El Cellar De Can Roca is cleverly designed to look like a flash site.
Although I believe function trumps beauty, I also recognize that the true masters are those who can achieve both. It baffles me that these chefs, known for their detailed-oriented personalities would allow their restaurants to be represented this way. Its not as if technology were released that could make tiny fairies fly around plates as they were placed on the table that these chef’s would jump at the opportunity.
It also escapes me why this isn’t part of a restaurant’s review. If a reviewer from the times called to make a reservation and was treated rudely on the phone, we’d surely read about it in the review. How is this different? Isn’t it like being on hold for too long? Or asking a question about the menu but being forced to listen to the chef’s biography before getting the answer to you wanted. Having a horrible website has got to be as bad as a bad odor when entering a restuarant.
Restaurant websites should be simple. Their purpose is to provide information. They should load fast and be accessible from my mobile device. This means no flash. They can still be sexy and satisfy this criteria, open-source web designs has plenty of good-looking free site templates (the bitter_sweet one is proof-positive that simplicity can be attractive). Also, the websites should be up-to-date, the “Fall” menu shouldn’t be there in May. It should be easy to get the phone number, make a reservation and see the menu (with prices). Let me know if I’m being unreasonable. My view is that I should be able to obtain information online faster than I can over the phone. That’s why there’s a website (and to take workload off those who answer the phone). You’d think the most successful chef/owners in the business would adhere to this philosophy the same way they do with their dishes. I wonder why they don’t. Am I crazy? I can’t be the only one bothered by this.
Tags: Rant
I don’t think you’re crazy, but I think the mobile phenomenon is a relatively recent one and website design is not a chef’s area of expertise. Google is working around the clock to try to make all of our apps compatible with mobile usage and we’re still not perfect. And we ARE supposed to be experts at web design.
It will take time before brick and mortar businesses of all types understand that people’s first impression of their store is most likely going to be online using a phone at a bar.
This is not just a mobile issue, its a functionality issue in general. I have as much of a problem with the sites on my normal computer as I do on my mobile. You all at Google may be working on mobile compatibility, but for these restaurants compatibility shouldn’t be an issue at all. The sites shouldn’t be flashed-based to begin with, and then they’d be mobile-compatible AND functional (read: easy to use) in my regular browser by default. We at TFB are working around the clock to eat and write and we get peeved when it takes more than 10 minutes to go to a restaurant website to locate the menu just to recall the exact name of the dish we’re currently writing about.