A Sign Post

This concept had been floating around for years before Anthony Bourdain wrote about it (in Kitchen Confidential, natch):

"I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn’t a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and workspaces look like. Bathrooms are relatively easy to clean. Kitchens are not."

And with that, the impact of bathrooms on our first impressions of restaurants instantly went from "Ha! Yeah, that's funny" to "We're definitely checking the bathrooms before we check the menu."

(I'm not a hardliner. I'll give the restaurant the benefit of the doubt so long as the bathroom isn't so bad that it looks like somebody gave birth or field-dressed a deer in there. But I'm not ordering any shellfish.)

I realized something recently: I've started to feel the same way about AI-generated signs and menus as Anthony Bourdain felt about dirty bathrooms.

I was at the sort of town event where food trucks happen. You're familiar with the situation: you're navigating the "where should we get takeout from tonight?" question by strolling through a parking lot instead of scrolling through DoorDash or whatever.

Despite my hankering for barbecued something-or-other, I put this chicken truck into a lower tier because of its signage:

All of their signs and menus were like this. I won't show the rest because I sure don't want to name and shame. I don't think they're bad or careless people. I think they simply define themselves as people who make barbecued chicken and related sides, not as sign makers. They needed a sign to hype up their loaded fries. They used this magical tool that can make that happen for free. They can spend their time fine-tuning their Creole spice blend, not font sizes.

It just…it doesn't make a strong case for this food truck. Lord knows I never miss a chance to make fun of the idea that "the side of the fence that nobody sees must look just as good as the side that everybody sees," but these little details do make an impression. It's advertising signage. The surface details are supposed to impress. Ideally, they'd have hired a freelancer to do their signage, or maybe they have someone in their organization who's handy with a pack of colored markers.

Failing all of that, even an amateurish sign put together by somebody doing the best they could would have made a bigger impact. The AI-generated sign that they went with says "we put as little effort as possible into this."

It isn't even a good AI-generated sign, is it? That "slash marker" style of lettering has very much become the "seven-fingered hand" of signs and flyers generated by AI. It's a damning tell and it's everywhere. This ethos is a red (or reddish) flag when I'm considering introducing something into my digestive system.

Compare that with this menu placard at a sushi restaurant in Brookline, Massachusetts. This sign in the window (typical of many) made such an impression on me at that moment that I had to get a photo, and then I had to get lunch there.

Just looking at it makes me want to go back there for lunch today. That's the power of good signage, even though the restaurant disappeared to the lands of ghosts and winds over ten years ago.

Whereas the chicken truck's AI-generated signage (did they even bother to click the "try again" button once or twice?) dropped them down to a second-tier choice. I would have come back and reconsidered it only if none of the other food trucks Sparked Joy. The Burmese Fusion truck's signature chicken noodle bowl handily won the day:

I believe their signage medium was dry-erase marker on a whiteboard. The sign was perfectly fine. The food was exceptional (and it was the same price as the loaded fries from the AI place).

I suppose I ought to stick up for AI here. I couldn't remember what kind of dish this was, so I gave the photo to Gemini and asked for an identification. The only help I could offer was that I'd bought it off a food truck, though I didn't say where it was. Gemini identified the dish…and correctly named the exact food truck.