I’m not sure why I’ve been picking up on “user experience” issues in the food and food service industries recently — I guess I love food and therefore get easily frustrated when these issues hamper my enjoyment of the cuisine I enjoy consuming so much.

Case in point: I was out to dinner the other night and I ordered a rack of lamb. The server informed me that the chef recommends the lamb medium rare, which worked out well as I planned to order it that way anyhow. As such, I expected the lamb to be cooked to a solid pink throughout. When it arrived, however, I was disappointed to find the lamb dark red in the center, barely cooked at all.

Aside from the general annoyance that comes from sending food back when the other person at the table has their entree, I became even more frustrated after discussing the situation with a passing waiter. While apologizing, he told me that “the chef’s medium rare is generally pretty rare“. A kitchen error (especially at an expensive “fine dining” restaurant like the one we were at) is troubling enough, but this piece of information was even more agitating. If the chef considers medium rare to be rarer than what is considered medium rare by the general public, why didn’t the waitress tell me that when I ordered the food?

As only a dorky UX professional would, I got to thinking about Jared Spool’s current knowledge vs. target knowledge theory. My current knowledge at the time was the common definition of medium rare. (This may be somewhat debatable, but I’ll stand by my opinion if epicurious agrees.) The target knowledge, in this situation, is the chef’s version of meduim rare. With no other explanation on the menu or from the waitress, as a customer I could only assume that this restaurant’s medium rare is the same as the common opinion. And because I assumed that my current knowledge was enough, I had a terrible experience.

Interestingly, the only restaurant (in my experience) that consistently does this well is Outback Steakhouse (which hardly qualifies as fine dining). At Outback, when a steak is ordered, the server always confirms the temperature ordered for clarification. For example, a customer ordering medium rare will be told something to the effect of: “that will be slightly red in the middle with a little pink” (Outback’s temperatures lean to the rarer side). This effectively fills the gap between current knowledge and target knowledge!

Perhaps in the future, I’ll take more time to clarify with the server to ensure that what I consider medium rare is consistent with the chef’s perception. Wouldn’t it be easier, however, if we all just used the same terminology for the same thing?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2005 at 6:44 pm and is filed under product usability, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.