- Is a screen right for a sit down restaurant?
- For the door and the bar, yes. For the table, no. A screen at the entrance answers the questions people ask before they commit, which are what kind of food, roughly what price, and are you open. At the table the paper menu is still better, because it is browsed slowly, held, and shared. A restaurant that replaces its table menu with a screen has solved a problem it did not have.
- How do I run a daily special on it?
- Give it the first slide and change one line each morning. The value of a screen in a kitchen that changes its specials is exactly this: the special is on the board before service instead of after it, and it comes off when the last plate goes out. If the special changes every day and the board does not, the board is training people not to read it.
- What language should the dish names be in?
- The names you use in the kitchen, with a short line of English under the ones a stranger will not know. Cacio e pepe stays cacio e pepe; vongole gets clams, white wine, chilli under it. Translating everything flattens the menu and reads as a tourist board, and translating nothing loses the person choosing between two things they cannot picture.
- Can the same board work in the window and inside?
- The content can, the shape usually cannot. A window screen is read from the pavement, at distance, often in daylight, so it wants fewer lines and bigger type, and it is frequently portrait because a window is tall. An interior board can carry more. Build both from the same deck rather than rotating one design, since a rotated layout re-wraps every line.
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