Are digital (so called "QR menus") a temporary thing, and one year down the road we all will be using paper menus?
Or is it just the first step, and every restaurant will have a slick online menu 3-5 years from now?
Anything in between?
We have a young kid and most of the time one of us (my spouse or myself) have to be paying attention to her, especially while outside. Looking at a restaurant menu on a mobile phone makes it pretty much impossible to look at and share and discuss items on the menu, while the other person can only pay 20% of attention (because the other 80% attention is on the kid). The end result is usually one person can't really order what they want. Paper menus are larger, have pictures, easier to flip around pages or sides, easier to point to things between two people (when one is not paying full attention) and generally more visible (when one is not paying full attention).
It's bad enough that we either avoid places with digital menu or have to make plans in advance to be sure we look through the menu at home the day before going.
But I also don't think that the development will go further than this, given that most restaurant owners aren't exactly tech savvy people and in my experience, many don't seem or understand the benefits a more digital experience could bring them.
My mom still has a flip phone and does not want to get a smartphone at all. Not everybody has the desire to have a flip phone. They would not be able to look at the menu in any meaningful way.
Many of the restaurants I've seen with QR codes for menus have the QR as a sticker on the table. It isn't hard for somebody to create a QR that leads to a malicious site and just place those on top of the existing QR codes.
There's something nice about the tangibility of a physical menu. But if a company can create a super sleek product for a digital menu, and perhaps integrates direct payments into it (so that people don't have to Venmo each other etc), then that could be an awesome opportunity.
I can see them being a lot more common in chain restaurants, but plenty of restaurant owners still aren't that proficient with tech.
Some restaurants will realise this and switch to paper menus, or alienate part of their clientele.