Feast Your Eyes on Japan's Fake Food

My spouse and I grew up in Japan and then moved to America. We have never stopped hating the non-illustrated menus that virtually every restaurant offers. There’s no way to know what you’re really getting. The ingredients don’t really tell you much about the dish you’re going to eat, aside from simple things like steak and similar. Sometimes, restaurants also want to be original and write some mambo jumbo in the menu as if I was interested.

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_model

I miss Japan so much.

What’s interesting to me is how functional this is, not just decorative. The fake food isn’t about realism for its own sake, but about reducing ambiguity: you instantly understand portion size, ingredients, and even relative price without sharing a language. In a way it feels like a very physical form of UX design, solving a real communication problem long before digital menus or translations were common. I’m curious whether this tradition persists mainly out of nostalgia now, or if restaurants still see measurable benefits from it.

https://archive.ph/RH5Tv

> Japanese people like to say that they “eat with their eyes,” relishing the colors, shapes, and textures of a dish before it ever hits the tongue

That's interesting, because, as a French person, I'm used to restaurant menus being, at best, a few words written on paper ; and sometimes there's no physical support and the menu is only provided orally by the waiter.

And places that display pictures of the food or, even worse, plastic replicas, tend to turn down my appetite. It feels gross and unnatural. I think part of it is because it means two things: either you'll have exactly the same thing in your plate, which mean industrialized food, or it won't match what you've been shown, you've been lied to.

Meanwhile, in restaurants without visual clues, you can only let your imagination go wild and guess what you're going to have. Once the plate is put in front of you, two surprises awaits you: does it looks like what you imagined and is it good?

At least that's the experience I'm looking for in restaurants.