With Diners Club shining their dodgy spotlight on restaurant wine lists again, the whole issue of sponsored lists and pay to play raises its ugly head. Does Diners differentiate between restaurants run by wine lovers who search out vinous jewels and those that charges listing fees in cash or product or even have the whole thing sponsored by producers with deep pockets in exchange for umbrellas, witches’ broomsticks or what-have-you. A concerned wine distributor emailed a request from a major SA ethnic restaurant chain who implement a “listing fee per wine per category of R6500-00 (ex VAT) and that is for a minimum period of one year.” They claim to already receive “significant contributions” from the biggest producers in SA. Do such restaurants qualify for a Diners Club Award. Oops – they’ve won Platinum in the past!

Meanwhile some tips from The Guardian on tricks sharp restaurateurs apply to induce diners to spend more. Does the organization of the wine list mimic the layout of the food menu, I wonder? Perhaps Diners can fund a research project to find out!

The menu

How much we spend on a meal hinges on the way the menu is presented. Everything – from the listing of the dishes to the language of the descriptions – has been designed to appeal to your senses.

While you would assume that we read a menu from left to right, studies show that our eyes gravitate toward the upper right-hand corner first. This is often where the “anchor” – or the most profitable item – is located.

But this particular ploy is more cunning than simply getting you to buy the most expensive dishes: typically, having this usually quite costly dish listed will make everything look reasonably priced in comparison.

“Having an outrageously expensive item is both likely to get publicity for a restaurant, and will also get people to spend more,” says Charles Spence, experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford and co-author of The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining.

“People think ‘I wonder if anyone ever orders that?’, without realising that its true purpose is to make the next most expensive item seem cheaper.”

Conversely, research suggests that diners look at the bottom left of a menu last, so this is where the least expensive dishes will be positioned.

Even the way the food and drink is listed can subconsciously influence our spending.

Many diners will order the second least-expensive bottle on wine in an attempt to avoid looking cheap. Knowing this, restaurants place the highest markup on that very bottle.

Diners on a budget will often scour the menu and choose one of the three cheapest dishes, but the restaurant industry is fully aware of this and takes steps to ensure bumper profits.

“Restaurants will centre-align a list to make it more difficult to compare prices,” says Spence. “If you right-justify items, customers can more easily compare and will be less likely to go for more expensive items,” he says.

And watch out for those pound signs – or lack of them. A study from American university Cornell found that guests given a menu with only numbers and no currency symbols spent significantly more than those who received a menu with prices either showing currency symbols or written out in words.

According to Gregg Rapp, a California-based menu engineer, the use of photographs and illustrations is also a large order driver. “Using a picture can increase sales of an item by as much as a third when there is just one photograph on the page,” he says.