Today's menu: Modern menus match food trends

Care for a menu, ma'am? Say yes, and what you will get is a million miles from the classic printed menu of yesteryear. Today's menus are either scrawled on the wall, posted on Facebook, or delivered verbally.

A perfectly pitched menu is an integral part of the eating and drinking experience, says Cameron Bruhn​ of Architecture Media, presenter of Australia's annual Eat-Drink-Design Awards. "Menus are often overlooked and can get lost," he says. "They work better for the restaurant and for the diner when they have some physicality and drama and are more than just a piece of paper."

He says Sydney's Fratelli Paradiso​'s vast blackboard menu is a great example. "It never changes, yet they read it out to you every single time," he says. "The actual menu takes second place to the theatre and performance."

For some, the menu is a tool to encourage interaction between diner and waitstaff. "My ideal menu would be a single question mark," says Charl Laubscher​ of Melbourne cafe Little Big Sugar Salt. "Then everyone would be forced to talk to each other."

No longer divided into the Holy Trinity of "entree, main, dessert", today's menus are either minimalist shopping lists of ingredients (a total of 42 on Japanese omakase restaurant Kappo in Melbourne alone), or roll calls of the year's buzz words. New technology, food trends, and different dining styles – from lengthy degustations to share plates to canteen queue-ups – have all kicked in to make the menus at Australia's top restaurants as innovative and full of character as the food. Here are today's specials.

Writ by hand

Many small restaurant menus are now written by hand on card, clipboard, or a sheet of butcher's paper pulled down from a wall-mounted roll, to evoke the personal, hand-made and small-scale nature of the cooking.

Not everyone is a fan. "If only the hand-written list of daily specials was legible," sighed a leading restaurant critic, of Kylie Kwong​'s characteristic scrawl at Billy Kwong​'s in Potts Point​.

Manipulation by design

Author William Poundstone​ analysed over 100 menus in his book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value in order to unveil the hidden psychology of menu design. He claims diners experience Extremeness Aversion, shying away from the most expensive dish on the menu only to settle on the second most expensive. So when restaurateurs list eye fillet at $56 next to rib-eye at $48, we all order the rib-eye, believing we are saving money. Likewise, the second most expensive bottle of wine, he says, tends to be a top seller. And you know how your eye is drawn to anything listed in a box? Well, so do they. Restaurants reserve them for the most profitable items.

New buzz words

Some will never change – crispy, sticky, crunchy. "There is no place for any adjective on a menu," says Mark Best of Marque Restaurant. "Descriptors ending in 'y' should be banned by law." The new buzz words: Chops. Kombucha. To share. Spit-roasted. Wood-fired. Smoked. Charred. Burnt. Ash. Charcoal. Seaweed. Curd. #Hashtag.

Fresh daily

Modern technology allows restaurants to print off a new menu in seconds. "We work with some pretty small growers, so we take what we can when they can provide it, and change the menu instantly," says Hadleigh Troy of Perth's Restaurant Amuse, where "Beef, apple, coal and celeriac" and "Marron, carrot, quinoa and buckwheat" have won him rave reviews. "The pros are seasonality, flexibility and never getting bored."

The burden of choice

Too many dishes, and we get confused and overwhelmed. Too few, and we feel miffed. A recent study by Britain's Bournemouth University found that when in fine-dining establishments, most people preferred seven options for entrees, 10 for mains, and seven for dessert.

Going "soshal"

At the canteen-style Kitchen by Mike in Roseberry​, Mike McEnearney​ uses social media to spread the word; he writes the day's menu on the way back from the market, posting it on Facebook by 7am. At Abbotsford's Little Big Sugar Salt cafe, the cheeky, challenging, "mostly healthy" food pyramid menu encourages diners to Instagram and hashtag their Scram & Ham. "It's a subversive way to create an interactive collection of food photography," says Laubscher. "In fact, a lot of people only know about us through seeing the food on Instagram."

Over-sized and over here

"I like the physicality of an over-sized menu," says Cameron Bruhn, citing the tall, freestanding menu at Bar Di Stasio​ in St Kilda. "It's not just a piece of paper, it's a design object. It's three dimensions, and not just two."

Off the wall

At Adelaide's cool Street ADL, the menu is an art installation in its own right, with dishes listed in various large and small multicoloured light boxes across the exposed brick wall. Pork crackling, $6.90. Pulled kanga sangas, $12.90. The "menu", as such, adds energy and light to the room.

Eat first, read later

At Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck at Melbourne's Crown, the menu is slipped into a large, velvety, wax-sealed envelope and handed to you as you leave, not before.

At Marque Restaurant in Surry Hills, the menu doesn't hit the table until the five- or eight-course degustation is over. "I want people to come with an open mind and relax," says Marque's Mark Best. "Just let me cook. A lot of people are very uncomfortable with that."

At Perth's Restaurant Amuse, the degustation menu is discreetly left on the table, folded in half. "It's for the guests to decide if they wish to read ahead, or keep what's to come as a surprise," says owner-chef Hadleigh Troy. How many peek? "About 50/50."

Every Trendy Restaurant Menu

In the US, leading restaurant website eater.com designed its own "Every Trendy Restaurant Menu" pastiche (printed entirely in lower case) to highlight current trends. Listings include:

tiny stuff you're supposed to share, $9

eight olives in a ramekin, $9

burger that's crazier than it needs to be, $19

token vegetarian dish – probably a pasta, $21

pork chop from a wise, soulful farmer, $31

tarted-up pork belly, $16

truffle oil-tainted mashed potatoes, $12

might-be-dry chicken for two, $55

Australia's Top Restaurants, presented by Qantas and Vittoria Coffee, will be announced May 18, 2015.