A growing number of restaurants are releasing menus consisting of nothing but emojis to describe the dishes, according to food news and dining guides website Eater.
Reportedly, one of the first to jump on board with the quirky, publicity-generating craze was Little Yellow Door in London’s Notting Hill.
Here, guests can not only choose what to order from a special emoji menu, but they can make a reservation via mobile messaging app WhatsApp.
The licenced pop-up’s menu uses emojis like ‘cow’ and ‘baguette’ in place of its previous menu descriptions – which, in this instance, would have been “a seared steak roll with truffle mayo, caramelised onions, and rocket”.
“Some people pick it up straight away, and some people find it a little bit trickier.
“One of the things we debated was whether we make it super easy, and we were like, ‘Look, that’s kind of the point — you have to spend a little bit of time to work it out’,”” Little Yellow Door owner Kamran Dehdashti told Eater.
ÂA post shared by The Little Yellow Door (@the_little_yellow_door) on Jul 14, 2016 at 3:48am PDT
Other concepts to embrace social media practices include Brooklyn’s Sunken Harbor Club, which launched an all-emoji cocktail menu, and casual dining chain Pizza Hut, which released a temporary all-emoji menu at six of its UK restaurants in honour of World Emoji Day,
One of Pizza Hut’s competitor’s, Domino’s, also embraced technology as a way to appeal to customers by introducing a ‘tweet to order’ system back in May 2015, whereby customers with a Domino’s account can tweet a pizza emoji to Domino’s to place their order.
