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Restaurants with handwritten menus are seen as healthier, study says

From the dim lighting to the trendy tunes, there are countless factors beyond the food that influence what you think about a restaurant. Now, a new study claims that even the font chosen for a menu can influence your perception. The study, led by Stephanie Liu, an Assistant Professor of Consumer Sciences at The Ohio State University, suggests that restaurants with handwritten menus (as opposed to machine-written/professionally printed) are seen as having better tasting food. Research found that the imperfect handwritten font generated more favorable attitudes toward the menu overall. Furthermore, the food was perceived as being healthier. The findings are explained in the abstract of the paper, published in the Journal of Business Research: “The results show that handwritten typeface creates a competitive advantage by conveying a sense of human touch, which subsequently induces the perception that love is symbolically imbued in the restaurant’s offerings.” The researchers then determined that…

Warning: You may not want to use the pepper shaker at restaurants

The next time you’re out to eat, you may want to consider whether you really need to add salt and pepper to your meal. It turns out, pepper shakers are one of the dirtiest items in a restaurant. According to a study from ABC News, pepper shakers harbor one of the highest bacteria counts at a public dining facility with counts reaching 11,600 — second only to restaurant menus. (And for your complete disgust, restaurant menus were found to carry the most — an average bacteria count of 185,000 — and have 100 times more bacteria than your typical toilet seat.) The study examined swab samples taken from common table items at 12 restaurants throughout New York, Ohio, and Arizona. The swabs were then examined for “total bacteria counts and coliform — a broad class of bacteria found in our environment. The presence of coliform can indicated fecal matter.” Dr.…