On the Weird World of Secret Menus
On an ordinary August afternoon, I turned into the drive-thru lane at the In-N-Out Burger on Sunset and Orange with a special mission. I wanted to see what it was like to order from the “secret menu”—the set of items not on the menu, but available to those in the know. I was also keen to find its limit. Where would the restaurant draw the line on special requests?
In-N-Out’s secret menu was legendary. For decades, it had been so widely publicized, mostly by fans customizing their orders and spreading the word, that the company listed six of the most famous off-menu items on its website. With Not-So-Secret Menu as the title, In-N-Out clearly saw the irony.
In spite of that, further layers of secrecy—and secret telling—remained. Longer lists with dozens of variations on burgers, fries, and shakes circulated in the press, on blogs, and on social media. Conflicting accounts about what In-N-Out would or wouldn’t serve kept things speculative. They also gave my outing a tinge of adventure.
Once I reached a signal point in the lane, a uniformed employee approached my car with a menu hanging from her POS. To establish trust, I dutifully ordered from the laminated list first. Then I asked for the 3×3. This cheeseburger with three beef patties and three slices of cheese was on the not-so-secret menu. If my location were up to the chain standard, the request would go smoothly.
The item was firmly in the system. Submitting the order took no extra typing, and my bill would show a computer-generated “3×3.”
I threw the curve ball last. I planned to ask for something I hadn’t seen on any list. I knew that a grilled cheese was on the not-so-secret menu, and I’d read that some customers who requested a cheeseburger with french fries inside had been turned down. I made up a hybrid just as likely to fail.
“Can you do a grilled cheese with fries inside?”
“We can’t do that.”
Aha!
“Okay, how about with onions?” I countered.
“Sure.”
This exchange confirmed my dawning realization about secret menus. Like my grilled cheese with onions, they have to be negotiated on the spot.
Sometimes we’re the first to chart an off-menu course. More often, we’re standing on the shoulders of countless prior negotiators, whose efforts have solidified into that rumored list. Secret menus foster incessant bargaining because they depend on uncertainty. We can never predict the extent of a secret menu, and there’s always some doubt about what will be available to us.
Why does the custom persist? I would argue that keeping the limits of hospitality veiled, no matter how lightly, serves the interests of restaurateurs and diners alike.
Customers make off-menu requests for a variety of reasons. If not purely for research, my motive at In-N-Out, we do it to have our tastes accommodated, to appear in the know, or to get superior treatment. In those cases, ordering off menu makes us feel special. The belief that there’s some risk of rejection—even if only for other people—gives special orders a further air of triumph.
Restaurateurs who offer unlisted items also have several possible motives. They may want to exceed diners’ expectations, reward valued patrons, or prompt positive word of mouth for the restaurant. If those items were fixed, explicit, and promised to all, they wouldn’t serve these purposes. They’d also belong on the regular menu.
Keeping off-menu lists in the shadows also makes them easier to contain. If special ordering goes unchecked, it could jeopardize the economies of the regular menu. In essence, for secret menus to be socially and economically valuable, they must appear mysterious and negotiable. In dealings, however, not all follow the same rules.
So much depends on the way an establishment structures the relationship between restaurateur and diner. The kind of service a restaurant provides—not by vagaries of server personality or diner traffic, but at the planning level where the bones of a restaurant form—determines nearly everything about its off-menu deliberations. It can dictate how and why a menu deviation starts, who gets it, the composition of the item itself, and whether and how rumors about it spread. It can even decide the tattle’s tone. The chasm lies between standardization and personalization.
As you might guess, chain restaurants with units in the many hundreds or thousands lean toward standardization. The larger the chain, the more it regulates everything from menus to service, which creates the public perception of a homogenous and regimented operation.
This is the strongest at limited-service chains because every segment of the company-designed encounter between patron and server is at its most rote. Regulars are supposed to be addressed the same way as first-timers. Managers don’t encourage servers to recall a repeat customer’s favorite dish or how much ice she likes in her tea. That would only slow operations down—the kiss of death for a high-volume operation. If a server does become familiar with a repeat customer, that relationship could lead to special treatment, such as extra generous provisions of fries or special sauce, but interactions like these stray from the company line. Even when a menu allows customization, the protocols of the assembly line don’t waver, and while loyalty programs tailor offerings to individuals, these propositions are algorithmic, not improvised. (...)
Malcolm Bedell’s “11 McDonald’s Menu Hacks That Will Change Your Life,” which came out in LA Weekly in 2013, did so in the extreme. In addition to listing a variety of McDonald’s off-menu dishes, Bedell boasted a suite of payment-evading ruses. These included what he called “dollar menu hacks,” for which one had to order two of the least expensive items on the menu and combine them to approximate the contents, but not the cost, of a regular-menu item. Below is the author recommending a Budget Big Mac:
by Alison Pearlman, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
On an ordinary August afternoon, I turned into the drive-thru lane at the In-N-Out Burger on Sunset and Orange with a special mission. I wanted to see what it was like to order from the “secret menu”—the set of items not on the menu, but available to those in the know. I was also keen to find its limit. Where would the restaurant draw the line on special requests?
In-N-Out’s secret menu was legendary. For decades, it had been so widely publicized, mostly by fans customizing their orders and spreading the word, that the company listed six of the most famous off-menu items on its website. With Not-So-Secret Menu as the title, In-N-Out clearly saw the irony.
In spite of that, further layers of secrecy—and secret telling—remained. Longer lists with dozens of variations on burgers, fries, and shakes circulated in the press, on blogs, and on social media. Conflicting accounts about what In-N-Out would or wouldn’t serve kept things speculative. They also gave my outing a tinge of adventure.Once I reached a signal point in the lane, a uniformed employee approached my car with a menu hanging from her POS. To establish trust, I dutifully ordered from the laminated list first. Then I asked for the 3×3. This cheeseburger with three beef patties and three slices of cheese was on the not-so-secret menu. If my location were up to the chain standard, the request would go smoothly.
The item was firmly in the system. Submitting the order took no extra typing, and my bill would show a computer-generated “3×3.”
I threw the curve ball last. I planned to ask for something I hadn’t seen on any list. I knew that a grilled cheese was on the not-so-secret menu, and I’d read that some customers who requested a cheeseburger with french fries inside had been turned down. I made up a hybrid just as likely to fail.
“Can you do a grilled cheese with fries inside?”
“We can’t do that.”
Aha!
“Okay, how about with onions?” I countered.
“Sure.”
This exchange confirmed my dawning realization about secret menus. Like my grilled cheese with onions, they have to be negotiated on the spot.
Sometimes we’re the first to chart an off-menu course. More often, we’re standing on the shoulders of countless prior negotiators, whose efforts have solidified into that rumored list. Secret menus foster incessant bargaining because they depend on uncertainty. We can never predict the extent of a secret menu, and there’s always some doubt about what will be available to us.
Why does the custom persist? I would argue that keeping the limits of hospitality veiled, no matter how lightly, serves the interests of restaurateurs and diners alike.
Customers make off-menu requests for a variety of reasons. If not purely for research, my motive at In-N-Out, we do it to have our tastes accommodated, to appear in the know, or to get superior treatment. In those cases, ordering off menu makes us feel special. The belief that there’s some risk of rejection—even if only for other people—gives special orders a further air of triumph.
Restaurateurs who offer unlisted items also have several possible motives. They may want to exceed diners’ expectations, reward valued patrons, or prompt positive word of mouth for the restaurant. If those items were fixed, explicit, and promised to all, they wouldn’t serve these purposes. They’d also belong on the regular menu.
Keeping off-menu lists in the shadows also makes them easier to contain. If special ordering goes unchecked, it could jeopardize the economies of the regular menu. In essence, for secret menus to be socially and economically valuable, they must appear mysterious and negotiable. In dealings, however, not all follow the same rules.
So much depends on the way an establishment structures the relationship between restaurateur and diner. The kind of service a restaurant provides—not by vagaries of server personality or diner traffic, but at the planning level where the bones of a restaurant form—determines nearly everything about its off-menu deliberations. It can dictate how and why a menu deviation starts, who gets it, the composition of the item itself, and whether and how rumors about it spread. It can even decide the tattle’s tone. The chasm lies between standardization and personalization.
As you might guess, chain restaurants with units in the many hundreds or thousands lean toward standardization. The larger the chain, the more it regulates everything from menus to service, which creates the public perception of a homogenous and regimented operation.
This is the strongest at limited-service chains because every segment of the company-designed encounter between patron and server is at its most rote. Regulars are supposed to be addressed the same way as first-timers. Managers don’t encourage servers to recall a repeat customer’s favorite dish or how much ice she likes in her tea. That would only slow operations down—the kiss of death for a high-volume operation. If a server does become familiar with a repeat customer, that relationship could lead to special treatment, such as extra generous provisions of fries or special sauce, but interactions like these stray from the company line. Even when a menu allows customization, the protocols of the assembly line don’t waver, and while loyalty programs tailor offerings to individuals, these propositions are algorithmic, not improvised. (...)
Malcolm Bedell’s “11 McDonald’s Menu Hacks That Will Change Your Life,” which came out in LA Weekly in 2013, did so in the extreme. In addition to listing a variety of McDonald’s off-menu dishes, Bedell boasted a suite of payment-evading ruses. These included what he called “dollar menu hacks,” for which one had to order two of the least expensive items on the menu and combine them to approximate the contents, but not the cost, of a regular-menu item. Below is the author recommending a Budget Big Mac:
It’s a little known fact that any sandwich on the McDonald’s menu can be ordered “Like a Mac,” as in, “Let me get a McDouble, but make it like a Mac.” There’s even a button on the register devoted to this task in some locations. So you can order the lower-priced McDouble—hold the ketchup and mustard, add lettuce and Big Mac sauce. Total price, with substitutions = $1.49, $2.40 less than a Big Mac and all you’ll be missing is the third slice of bun, some sesame seeds, and most of your dignity.The latter didn’t really bother Bedell. The gamesmanship was too much fun.
by Alison Pearlman, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
