The post states that soup is easy to make in large batches. This is true. Cut up some stuff toss it in a pot with some water, and turn on the stove (for the most part). You're just limited by the size of the pot, and the mechanisms you have for storing the soup.
I think it's rather hyperbolic to have some strong association between the word "soup" and cultural icons like "stone soup" stories.
Here's a thought experiment for you. Collect one copy of every restaurant menu written in English. Scan each menu to find food items that are primarily liquid in character. Note the word used to describe it, and the price of the item. Find the median list price for each word.
In your thought experiment, does the median price of a "soup" differ significantly from the median prices of "bisque", "stew", "chowder", "broth", "cream", "potage", or specifically named soups like "bouillabaisse", "gazpacho", "chili", or "pho"?
My hypothesis is that higher-end restaurants purposefully substitute "soup" with synonymous words to avoid the intrinsic association with frugality, and this practice lowers the observed median price of a "soup".
It would be for the same reason that some restaurants don't put $ or numbers with two decimal places anywhere on the menu. It's a psychological trick to prevent you from entering "cost-benefit evaluation mode" before ordering your meal, so you spend more. Compare the following to your own anecdotal restaurant experiences:
So when you order pho at a restaurant they have purposely named it pho instead of soup in an attempt to sound more "high class?" I'm sorry, but this seems like an extreme view. Most of those words exist to describe something specific. Do you expect to see "A bunch of vegetables cooked in water" or "vegetable soup" on the menu? Is the later an attempt to charge you more?
Take gazpacho as another example. It's a specific type of soup. You can't complain about this anymore than complaining that the menu says "vegetable soup" instead of just "soup." They have to describe the food adequately to you so that you know what you're getting.
No, I'm saying that when a chain restaurant with a psychologist on staff drafts the new menus, they will look at the entry for "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodle soup", and edit it to say "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodles in beef broth" instead.
"Normal" restaurants don't know all the tricks to get customers to spend more money, but businesses for whom that marginal 1% of revenues is significant will absolutely pick over their menus looking for loaded words and design tweaks.
If you have ever seen a smiley face on your receipt, that is a psych trick. It is experimentally proven to increase tips for female servers in midscale casual dining restaurants. Squat, smile, mimic. Push appetizers, booze, and desserts. Say you enjoy a dish yourself. Touch customers on the shoulder. Tell a joke. Pose a brainteaser. If a server does any of those things to you, they may have done their tip-boosting research.
Menu tweaks are pretty simple, actually:
- put cheaper, high-margin items near the most expensive thing on your menu
- create seasonal specials
- introduce new menu items as specials, sides, or appetizers rather than as an entree
- draw boxes around the popular items, or highlight them in some way
- carefully match descriptive tone with the desired clientele
- destroy all currency symbols
- suggest beverage pairings with the entree listing
- make high-margin items more discoverable
- chunk your menu into graspable categories; a giant pile of items should form a tree rather than a flat list
- make the most expensive thing on your menu more expensive
The word "soup" is a psychologically loaded word. You should only be using it on your menus if your overall marketing strategy is to attract value-based consumers.
> "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodle soup", and edit it to say "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodles in beef broth" instead
But in your original post you included "pho" in the list of words that restaurants use to replace the word "soup." In this example "Pho" is not being used as a replacement for "soup."
I do not think you understood what I was trying to say.
Quite a lot of people do not know restaurant dishes by their proper names. If you invent a name for your menu item, or use an existing name not common in the vernacular, you avoid most psychological associations with those words. You can describe a Reuben without ever using the words "sandwich", "meat", or "bread", for instance.
Reuben: corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and Russian dressing on rye; lightly toasted
You can even avoid saying "beef", "cheese", or "dressing".
Reuben: cured brisket, sauerkraut, Emmentaler, and Thousand Island on marbled rye; lightly toasted
"Reuben" is not a replacement for "sandwich". That's what it is, after all. But for this particular menu item, no one ever reads the word "sandwich", nor are they likely to say it when ordering. And when that word is not present, people are less likely to associate the restaurant dish with the thing they can almost certainly make at home at lower cost. That's the whole point. You're trying to avoid activating certain areas of the human brain that tend to rein in impulses and encourage activation of areas that stimulate reward-seeking behaviors.
It isn't rocket science, but it is a science. People get paid to experiment on how to encourage people to spend more money in retail stores, and the results they get are often significant enough to sell to businesses. Once you can see these particular fnords, you notice them everywhere. It's one of the reasons why I can hardly stand eating in casual dining chain restaurants any more: I see puppet strings attached to everything, from the moment I see the building to the second I leave.
> It would be for the same reason that some restaurants don't put $ or numbers with two decimal places anywhere on the menu.
I had thought it was a signifier that the place is supposed to be high-class; the implication to me is that open discussion of money is slightly distasteful and should be done as briefly as possible. (And leaving off decimal places in particular says "no one here is so regretfully poor as to consider quibbling over mere fractions of a dollar.")
The dollar sign is redundant and a constant reminder that the customer is giving up dollars they already have for food of unknown value. Humans are also hardwired to value a thing they already have more than something of equal nominal value that they could easily acquire.
In the same way that freemium games elide your spends of real money behind a layer of invented virtual currency, the goal is to make the customer forget that they are spending actual money.
I think it's rather hyperbolic to have some strong association between the word "soup" and cultural icons like "stone soup" stories.