10 Critical Website Mistakes That Boston Restaurants Make

Like many folks who dine out regularly, I spend a lot of time on restaurant websites, and I'm frequently appalled at how many basic mistakes of good website design are on display. Last year, without naming names, I gave this raspberry of an award in my blog's The 2009 Devil's Dining Awards: “Most deserving of a wake-up call: any restaurant in 2010 that still has a busy, gimmicky, Flash-heavy website.”

But apparently my barb didn't have much effect, perhaps in part because it lacked specifics. Let me redress that by citing my ten biggest pet peeves with Boston-area restaurant website designs, this time calling out a few flagrant sinners (and recognizing a few saints). My examples focus on some of Boston's more expensive and/or popular restaurants, as they have more to lose with a bad website than the neighborhood taquería, and can afford to do better.

Note that my slagging a website doesn't mean I think the restaurant itself is terrible – in fact, I like most of these places, love some of them. Also, I'm aware of my own website's homely design, but I blog for fun, not profit. If a reader thinks, “Damn, MC Slim JB's site is awful: I'm going somewhere else more user-friendly,” I don't lose revenue. Restaurants that repel customers with these fundamental flaws are kissing off potential business:

• Unsolicited music. Landing-page music was a novelty in 1998, an annoyance by 1999: users have hated this stupid trope since the days of the Hamster Dance. For the unwary surfer, it also announces to coworkers that he's researching his evening plans when he should be finishing his TPS reports. Not cool. The culprits are countless, but let's throw Da Vinci and Tapeo under this particular bus.

• A site that doesn't work on smartphones. Blackberries, iPhones, and many other mobile devices (like iPads) don't support Flash, so Flash-based restaurant websites aren't addressing a segment that include many business travelers, well-heeled diners, and other coveted customers. The offenders on this score are also legion; I'll single out two very popular restaurants that are among my favorites but that I'd expect to be hipper to this problem: Toro and Coppa.

• Lack of essential information on the home page. At a minimum, users should see the restaurant's address, phone number, hours of operation, and a link to an online reservation service like OpenTable (if offered) without having to click another link. Better yet, include those basics on every page. Sinners: Meritage, Blue Ginger. Saints: Hungry Mother, Union Bar & Grill.
  

• Missing menus. It is incredibly useful to see today's actual bill of fare, beer list, cocktail menu, and especially the wine list: I may need to research that perfect bottle. If you don't display all your current menus, at least offer good, representative samples. Miscreant: Olives Boston. Solid citizens: Troquet, Rialto.

• No menu prices. This is critical consumer information: nothing sucks the air out of a dining experience before it starts like sticker shock at the table. In an age where websites like MenuPages are posting scans of your menus online, it's ridiculous not to include prices on your own. Obfuscatory: L'Espalier, Locke-Ober. Transparent: Radius, Hamersley's Bistro.

• Unwieldy navigation controls. Many designs require users to precisely mouse over narrow menu bars or grab little sliders to scroll down the page. Clicking and dragging a slider just to read a menu is annoying even on a laptop with a big screen and mouse, can be painful on a compact netbook, and often doesn't work at all on a smartphone. Patience-tryers: Barbara Lynch venues like Menton, No. 9 Park, and The Butcher Shop.

• Videos and busy animations that force users to wait while every page loads. I expect many users wish they had spare time to admire your web designer's Flash animation skills, but most don't, so stop annoying them. Give them the information they're seeking quickly, without the frippery. Egregious offenders: Strega Boston, Via Matta.

• A menu that requires the user to download a five-megabyte Adobe Reader file. This is more typical of chain outlets and lower-end restaurants that simply scan their print menus rather than coding them in HTML. This is not only glacially slow to load, but can look cheap. Bandwidth hogs: Miel, Skipjack's.
  

• An online menu design that makes users click on separate links for each course (appetizers, soups, salads, entrees, desserts.) There's rarely a good reason to make anyone click more than once to see the whole dinner menu. Carpal-tunnel inducers: Oishii Boston, Bokx 109.

• Pop-up windows. Most web browsers assume that pop-up windows are ads and so automatically block them. It's plain stupid to try to deliver important information about your restaurant this way. Blockheaded: Mooo....

• Bonus mistake #11 (with a tip of the lid to Leila Cohan of Grub Street Boston): Websites that can't handle different browser window widths. The aforementioned Coppa shouts at you with an uppercase error message to resize your browser if yours isn't open at full width. Eastern Standard Kitchen & Drinks is even ruder: it just resizes your browser window without your permission.

In short, restaurants should keep their websites lean, clean, fast-loading, and easy to navigate, especially from mobile platforms. Useful exemplars of this less-is-more sensibility include O Ya, Craigie On Main, and T.W. Food. I expect that more and more marketing-savvy restaurateurs will likewise trim the gimcracks and gewgaws from their websites even as they expand their online presence through social-media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

The old Flash-intensive, desktop-oriented website aesthetic is sclerotic, increasingly ill-suited to how a smartphone-toting public uses the web. Don't keep burying the critical information your customers seek under a fog of lounge music, frenetic animation, and slow-loading videos and PDFs. You may well find a pared-down, mobility-enabled approach generates more customer goodwill and actual business than the current generation of busy, noisy, brand-fluffing restaurant websites.

“But There Is No Mr. L’Espalier!”, or, The Bane of the Grammar-Stickler Restaurant Critic

I believe most people are like me in that they harbor secret pet peeves, petty grudges against their fellow human beings that they hide because airing them would reveal them as cranks, obsessives, nutballs. “Really? That tiny issue bothers you? Who the heck cares about that? Who the hell even thinks about that?!” Luckily, I have a blog, and blogs were practically made for confessing these kinds of niggling idiosyncrasies. My private hell is being a grammar stickler, the kind that Lynne Truss describes in her slim, hilarious volume “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves”. Further, as a restaurant critic, I chafe at a very particular sub-order of grammatical irritant: the way people turn restaurant names into possessives.

It has bugged me since I was a kid: why do people have to append an apostrophe/letter-S to every restaurant name? Legal Sea Foods becomes Legal’s. Sonsie becomes Sonsie’s. It’s like people can’t wrap their minds around the notion that not every restaurant is named after an owner. The doofus logic seems to be, “This dude Sal owns a pizza place and calls it Sal’s Pizza, ergo it's L’Espalier’s, as in Mr. L'Espalier's Place.” Hearing this makes my blood boil. I know for a fact that it is L'Espalier, not L'Espalier's.

Brooking this solecism is a daily trial. Consider these renditions of popular Boston restaurant names as frequently spoken aloud by locals: Mistral’s, Beehive’s, Neptune’s, Silvertone’s, Pigalle’s, Aquitaine’s, La Voile’s, Douzo’s, EVOO’s, Hungry Mother’s, O Ya’s, Vlora’s. Yet if you go to the restaurant and look at the sign, you'll find no apostrophe+s in its name. To me, that errantly tacked-on possessive is as stupid and grating as a promo for The Real Housewives of New Jersey, only I can’t just turn it off. Everybody, but everybody, does it.

Does this common habit make you wince, clench your teeth, growl inwardly? If not, you are a normal person: move along. But if you’re a budding restaurateur who shares my absurd affliction, I believe I can help. Free of any consulting fees, I offer the following guide to selecting a restaurant name that won’t get you a damnable apostrophe+s wrongly bolted on, with real-life examples and counter-examples:

• Don’t pick anything that can easily be mistaken for a girl’s name. It’s not Clio’s, Sorellina’s, Regina’s, Carmen’s, Stella’s, Laurel’s, or Mamma Maria’s, but people love saying them that way – apparently they just feel better thinking some lady owns the place. Masculine names aren’t much better: people still refer to Dali’s and Da Vinci’s, even if they suspect that the famous dead guy doesn’t really own a piece of the joint.

• Avoid words that end in a vowel, especially Italian and Spanish ones; they’re too easy to pronounce with the bogus possessive attached. That way you won’t be seething like the owners who have to endure malapropisms like Cuchi Cuchi’s, Vee Vee's, Scampo’s, Rocca’s, Grezzo’s, Sportello’s, Erbaluce’s, Grotto’s, Picco’s, Pomodoro’s, Via Matta’s, Toro’s, Rialto’s, and Chacarero’s.

• Try tongue-twisters: choose a word ending in “s” (ideally non-plural: see below) or a difficult consonant cluster. Who can be bothered with the lip-work necessary to pronounce Radius’s, Meritage’s, Tossed’s, Rendezvous’s, or Les Zygomates’s? No one.

• Use physical locations: no sane person would think that Green Street might be the owner of a restaurant and so call that restaurant Green Street’s. Try rooms with “The” in front (The Oak Room, The Wine Cellar, The Blue Room), buildings (Church, Banq, House of Tibet, Peach Farm, Roadhouse), or addresses (Tory Row, No. 9 Park, Scollay Square, Kingston Station, Deep Ellum). No one comfortably says, “I just adore that place, The Butcher Shop’s.”

• Consider vague nouns, the more abstract the better, like District, Equator, Clink, Sage, Blue Ginger, Coda, Drink, Elephant Walk, Gaslight, Greek Corner, and Summer Winter. You won’t hear, “Let’s go to India Quality’s!”

• Befriend non-Latinate foreign words like Uni, Dok Bua, Kaze, Lala Rokh, Mela, Oishii, Tashi Delek, and Teranga. Those could be names, but most Anglophone Americans will feel uncertain about them, and thus be less likely to slap on the possessive.

• Use numbers to repel the apostrophe+s, like Bin 26, Cambridge, 1., and Grill 23.

• Even if you're comfortable with possessives, think carefully before you include an apostrophe. Is there really a Mr. Soya at Soya’s? Does a Ms. Zebra sit on the board of Zebra’s Bistro? I’d love to believe there’s a Pepper Sky running Pepper Sky’s Thai Sensation – she sounds like the star of a 1960s TV show about a secret agent who favors Mod fashions – but I suspect the truth is duller.

• To discourage unwanted written possessives, employ weird spellings, shouty ALL-CAPS, mixed case, all lowercase, and/or gimmicky punctuation, like Jer-Ne, OM, LiNEaGe, dbar, Mooo…, ZuZu!, and STIX. These already look bizarre enough; maybe folks will resist putting the extra crap on the end.

• Watch out for plural nouns; idiots may pronounce them properly, but in writing will jam in unwanted apostrophes. Just ask the poor souls at Pops (the chef/owner’s nickname), Josephs Two (run by two guys named Joseph, like Wise Men Three), Salts, Olives, Ten Tables, Anchovies, and Gargoyles on the Square. (Honestly, there’s no Uncle Gargoyle, so why would you write it as Gargoyle's?)

Phew, that made me feel better. Next, I must attempt to cleanse the English-speaking world of the Superfluous Pop-Culture “The”. You know, as in: the names of those movies are “Big Night” and “Alien”, not “The Big Night” and “The Alien”. Also, the name of that band is Talking Heads, not The Talking Heads. (That must have chapped their hides, too, as they used an album title to point this out.) Then I have to get Bostonians to stop referring to our central parks as the Boston Commons and Public Gardens: it's Boston Common and the Public Garden, you know. What do you mean, you don’t care?!