Ask a room full of people about QR menus and you will get an earful. Newspapers have run the same story for years, restaurants have gone back to paper, and the phrase "I hate QR menus" gets typed into search a few thousand times a month. Anyone selling you one should start there.

The complaints, honestly

• It is a PDF. You pinch, you zoom, you lose your place, you give up.
• It wanted an app, or an email address, or a login.
• The signal in the back room is one bar and the page never loads.
• Everyone at the table ends up looking at a phone instead of each other.
• Somebody at the table cannot read a phone screen, and now the meal is about that.

Four of those five are not complaints about a code on a table. They are complaints about what the code opened.

The PDF is the whole problem

A photograph of a printed menu is the worst version of both. It does not reflow, the text is small, a screen reader cannot read it, and it is usually months out of date because updating it means redoing the design.

A menu built as a page instead of a picture solves most of the complaints at once. Text sizes with the guest’s own settings, sections collapse, search works, and the whole thing loads on one bar of signal.

Never ask for anything at the door

No app, no account, no email, no cookie banner in the way of the fish. The guest scanned a code because they were hungry. Anything between the scan and the food reads as a toll.

Keep the paper

The strongest version of this is both. Printed menus stay on the pass for whoever wants one, and the code is there for whoever prefers it. Guests who like paper get paper, guests halfway through a second round get to order without catching an eye. Nobody is being made to do anything, which is where most of the anger came from.

The part guests never complain about

Notice what is missing from every complaint list: nobody has ever been annoyed that the dish they wanted was marked sold out before they ordered it. That is what a live menu is actually for, and it is the one thing paper can never do.

People do not dislike scanning. They dislike a photograph of a menu, an app they did not ask for, and being told this is the only way now.