Is this the future of restaurant menus?

In February, we explored the history of restaurant menus with a peek into the vintage menu archive housed at a New York Public Library. Now we can get an idea of what menus of the future will look like. Eater reports on the growing trend of adding supplemental information to restaurant menus, with a focus on an encyclopedia that will be made available to dining patrons in a new Seattle restaurant. 

Chef  Edouardo Jordan is preparing to open his second restaurant, Junebaby, and is busy with last minute preparations. He recently published the restaurant’s menu online, and with it, a digital “encyclopedia ” that explores terms on the menu as well as historical references. The idea came to the young chef after he began intensively researching and cooking the foods from the Southern United States. “I’m in the Pacific Northwest, doing Southern food, so I figured a lot of people might not be familiar with the dishes, ingredients, and techniques,” he says. Jordan hopes to one day make the online menu interactive, so diners can access the encyclopedia by clicking on specific words on the menu.

The expansive encyclopedia, which the chef and his director of operations, Suzi An,  created after researching hundreds of cookbooks, is following in the footsteps of other recent projects. Montreal’s Aunt Dai has  a menu filled with “owner’s words” explanations and insights. Mario Batali’s newest NYC restaurant La Sirena  offers an interactive online menu that includes stories and notes from the chef, and David Chang’s menu for Momofuku Nishi included several footnotes.