(Today's post was inspired by a walk around the Olympic Park)
The state of this.
It's from a menu in the window at Figo, an Italian restaurant in Endeavour Square, E20.
A menu in which prices are given to one decimal place rather than two.
The sheer pretentiousness of it.
Their breakfast menu is similarly affected.
All these brunches cost around nine pounds, but you might not immediately notice.
The absence of a pound sign tricks the subconscious into not thinking about money.
Then knocking off the trailing zeroes makes each price look less than it really is.
A cunning psychological double whammy, designed to make you order first and pay later.
This isn't new.
I first saw something similar in the City almost twenty years ago, using ½s rather than .5s.
But it is increasingly endemic, especially in locations where the clientele has money.
Endeavour Square is home to two particularly big office blocks, one housing hundreds of TfL staff, the other the Financial Conduct Authority. Figo is one of the handful of dining options outside, preying on those whose workplaces no longer run to a proper canteen.
Nextdoor is Signorelli, an Italian "artisan bakery and pasticceria", which is what passes for a cafe hereabouts.
The menu in their window plays the same trick.
Look past the banana bread and truffled mushrooms and concentrate on the figures.
3.8 and 5.2 are not prices, merely unitless numbers suggesting division into tenths.
2.0-2.8 is a decimal interval, not a price range.
But this peculiar format disguises its intention well.
If you're the kind of office worker who grabs a home made granola and yoghurt pot on the way into work rather than making a cheaper breakfast of your own, perhaps Signorelli deserves to bleed you dry of £3.80 on a daily basis.
It looks even weirder on the drinks menu.
4.8 for a bottled beer is designed to look cheaper than 'almost five quid' (and helps shield the fact it's the equivalent of £8.26 per pint).
As for the wine list, Signorelli may be willing to define the size of a glass in millilitres, but they're much less keen to suggest its price might be seven pounds. The price of a bottle looks even stranger, a ridiculous "twenty something point zero" to deflect from the genuine outlay required.
We're unlikely to see pricing to one decimal place in our supermarkets, where ".99" remains the psychological trick designed to make us subconsciously round down prices in store. But in the world of restaurant dining there is still one further step to go, as I discovered on the other side of the East Village.
This is the start of the menu at Chop Shop on Victory Parade.
Chop Shop has dispensed with decimal places altogether, and indeed with currency, presenting its entire price list as stark integers.
It's simple, and arguably less misleading than poncing around to one decimal place.
But it's also inflexible, a menu in which prices can only be a whole number of pounds and nothing inbetween, so likely to result in more brutal rounding up than gentle rounding down.
It's tempting to start a Campaign For Real Pricing, whereby restaurants are forced to display prices in recognisable currency to a meaningful number of decimal places rather than cutting everything short.
But as I photographed these menus I realised that we have already solved the problem, admittedly in a disproportionate way, by closing every restaurant, bar and cafe in the country. Brutal, but effective.
(Tomorrow's post was also inspired by a walk around the Olympic Park)
