Too Many Choices

“Whatever you choose, you might as well enjoy it. It is your choice.”

I've recently discovered a new pet peeve of mine.  While out to dinner with family, we were served a martini menu that must have had 20+ different types of martinis.  The martinis appeared in no particular order just scattered all across the menu.  With a lack of an structure to the menu, I struggled even contemplating what type of drink I wanted.  Sweet, sour, spicy, vodka, gin, the options were limitless (oh yea there was like 15 different types of vodka...).  Once I finally found a few I liked I was able to narrow it down, but menus should help you get what you want.  Drinks could have been organized by a gazillion different characteristics, but they went with nothing but a long list.  While choices can be good, if you can't actually get what you want then the choices are useless.  Maybe the best martini in the world lay somewhere in that list, but I quickly got too lazy to keep reading all of the descriptions and ordered the first one that looked good.

While having choices are better than not having choices, choices are only as good as the decisions you can make from them.  Just because there are 35 martinis on this menu does not mean that I can necessarily get exactly what I want.  If might be buried there but menus should be helping me uncover what it has to offer.

So, this is my plead to the world.  If you are going to make a ridiculously long drink menu, please make sure that you make it easy to digest, give me some structure of some kind.  It will make my life easier, and probably get me to order another as well.