When bad websites happen to good restaurants

Tweet 85 people Tweeted this1 person Dugg thisdiggdiggYahoo! Buzz ShareThis “If the flash animation is sick enough, I don’t mind if it crashes my browser.’’ — No people.

“I love downloading PDFs. Even if the menu is totally out of date, it’s worth the thrill.’’ — Absolutely no one.

“Who needs the phone number of a restaurant when you could be enjoying stock photos of food?’’ — Zero people in the history of time.

It quickly went viral, linked to by websites such as Eater and Huffington Post, retweeted hundreds of times.

A few weeks later, the website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency ran a piece titled “If This Fusion Restaurant’s Website Could Talk.’’ An excerpt: “HEY HEY HEY! Watch this slide show! LOOK! We have modern chairs and minimalist light fixtures!! LOOK! It’s an orchid floating in a pool at sunset! Want to hear some DANCE MUSIC???? Mute it any time you like! Just click the animated parakeet flying around the screen! You want to get into the site??? Just click the smallest fork!!! DANCE MUSIC!!!!!’’

Restaurant websites are famously bad. They are easy targets for mockery — often user-unfriendly tools that feature Flash animation, embarrassing techno music, and menus that turn out to be PDF files, as you realize only once they start downloading. Meanwhile, basic information about location and hours is hard to come by, daily specials lists date to 2006, pages are permanently “under construction,’’ and the darn things won’t load on your iPhone.

Anyone who enjoys eating out spends a lot of time looking at these sites. Perhaps you too have tried to view, say, the menu at Bergamot, only to be buzzed by an adorable cartoon bee flying whimsically all over your screen. Or maybe, on a groggy Sunday morning, you’ve turned to Coppa’s website for information about brunch and been defeated, in your pre-coffee state, by screens asking you to wait while they load, advising you to resize your browser window, and assaulting your eyeballs with flashing yellow and brown graphics. And God forbid you’ve needed information about a specific Todd English restaurant. You might have tracked it down, but not until after watching an animated version of the chef freaking to dance music while seasoning food and sharpening knives. It’s enough to make you want to create a restaurant website parody of your own.

This is not to single out these restaurants’ websites, which are no worse than many local establishments’. And the people behind them are aware they need work. Bergamot recently redid its site, and that bee is no longer on the wing; a long-outdated menu has also been replaced by a current one, albeit divided into separate PDFs for appetizers, entrees, etc. (Unfortunately, descriptions of the dishes are unreadable if you’re on a Mac.) Coppa chef and partner Jamie Bissonnette says they’re trying to figure out how to remove some of the Flash on their site. English’s website is being redone; a new version should launch within the next month.