8 Psychological Tricks of Restaurant Menus

A short, practical Mental Floss explainer of eight design tricks restaurants use to nudge what you order: removing dollar signs to reduce "pain of paying," anchoring with one outrageously priced item so everything else looks reasonable, calling out the chef's-pick dish in a box, deploying sensory words (slow-roasted, hand-cut) that boost perceived value, exploiting the eye-path on a menu page, limiting choices to reduce decision fatigue, and a couple more — turning ordering into a small case study in applied behavioural economics.