Opinion: Janhavi Gosavi walks into a bar... and walks right out when she realises it doesn’t have a menu.
I thought I’d be dramatic and rant to you about a hospitality-related gripe I have.
I loveee cocktails. They’re delicious and fun and make me feel fancy.
But in the past six months I’ve been to multiple cocktail bars that don’t have menus and they’ve rubbed me the wrong way.
Menuless bars have an “I’m not like other girls” aura about them.
The concept sounds nice - a knowledgeable bartender gets to know you and whips up custom cocktails tailored to your tastes.
But the more I think about it, menuless bars feel classist. Hear me out.
By not having a menu, bars put labour on the customer to figure out what they want without giving tangible guidelines to go off of.
My indecisiveness means when I’m given a physical menu, I huddle over it for an annoying amount of time and eventually order something I’m happy with. It’s part of my artistic process.
But if I have a bartender verbally tell me my drink options, I’m likely to order quickly out of panic and end up unhappy with my drink.
Not having a menu is especially difficult for people (neurodivergent or otherwise) who struggle to digest information that isn’t written down.
“Oh, you rattled off a list of 10 drinks you thought I might like? Sorry, I was busy trying to process the first drink you mentioned.”
It’s even trickier for those who don’t drink much and have no idea what their taste in liquor is.
How to make a bar inaccessible and unappealing
My first time at a menuless bar was for a friend’s leaving party.
I asked the bartender for a menu and was told “if we have the ingredients for the drink you want, we can make it”.
I blinked slowly, my mind flashing back to when I embarrassingly asked for a frilly cocktail at a pub and the barkeep laughed and said the most I could get was a vodka cranberry.
I stayed in line, not knowing if my drink of choice would be a burden or how much it would cost me.
The person in front of me ordered their drink and dared to ask how much it would be.
The bartender pointed to the eftpos machine and said “this much” but didn’t say the price out loud, leaving me confused.
I went up and ordered a berry gin sour and the person after me got a negroni. Both of us were charged $18.
But I wanted to know the scope of my options.
Were all drinks $18? Could I have gotten a Long Island iced tea for $18, which has way more booze than a gin sour does? If I ordered a glass of wine, how many dollars would I have saved?
I was spiralling.
Menus tell customers upfront how much a drink will cost – taking that transparency away makes a bar, in my opinion, inaccessible and unappealing to anyone on a budget.
Forcing us to ask about prices makes us feel like we should've stayed home and drank water instead.
Another bar I recently went to offered a custom cocktail option at the front of their menu, which intrigued me.
While the rest of their drinks had price tags attached, there was no estimate given on how much a custom drink would cost, which put me off from ordering one.
It felt like the bar was saying “you can only indulge in fun experiences if you’re wealthy enough to not care how much it costs”.
To most young people, every dollar matters.
So, if the drink I get at a menuless bar ends up being $4 more than I thought it would be, a part of my brain will spend the next several hours agonising over it.
Looking at the bigger picture, without written prices, customers can’t compare bars based on their affordability. They also can’t keep track of how their prices change over the years.
Most of us would find it unacceptable if we walked into a restaurant or cafe that wasn’t forthcoming about its offerings or its pricing.
As a simple minded cocktail lover, I don’t see why bars should be an exception.
And if you’re a menuless bar-owner, don’t hurt me. Just put some prices on the wall, would you?
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