Mini-OPED: Should Restaurants Use QR Code Menus?

Courtesy of Adobe

By  FORREST ZENG ‘26

I’m used to getting a physical menu when I sit down at Szech.

I tell the waiter what I want from the menu, who writes it on a piece of physical paper. They send it over to the physical chef waiting to make my deliciously fresh orange chicken. Then, I get a physical check and leave with a physical smile on my face.

I cannot stand it when a restaurant replaces all of these steps with a QR code pasted on the table. 

“Oh, but it’s convenient!”

Unless you’re looking for fast food, sit-down restaurants are supposed to be slow and deliberate. 

Sometimes that’s inconvenient. But it gives you more time to talk to your friends and the server.

When the food is good, you ask the waiter to “send a good word to the Chef.” You can’t do that on an app. 

QR code restaurants remove necessary human conversations.

The fewer people you meet and the more you stare at your lovely glass rectangle, the slower your social muscle works.

Your kids will lose another chance to learn social interaction. How do you expect a kid to ask nicely for anything if they’re so used to getting everything on a phone? It’s a basic skill that’s supposed to be learned in social situations like restaurants.

QR code restaurants don’t care.

Person-to-person interactions hold our society together.

Our everyday interactions with strangers in public settings keep us from tearing each other apart. It keeps us from isolating, as difficult and sometimes awkward as social conversations can be.

Something as simple as asking a waiter for a check or ordering from a menu supports our “togetherness” as a species.

If our only conversations are with our devices, the human conversations that undergird society will disappear.

A QR code might be convenient in a restaurant.

It’s not helpful when it removes the day-to-day conversations that make us human.

Thankfully, no restaurants in the town of Exeter have QR code menus…yet.

But what do you think? 

Should restaurants use digital technologies like QR codes to make ordering easier?

And how does technology in social places impact our social culture?