Cork Talk with Sean Willard

Sean Willard engineers menus and wine lists for a living. It’s a fascinating job that involves economics, science, art, psychology – and plenty of number crunching. Our enjoyable chat covered everything from font sizes to daily specials, how the pandemic changed the on-trade for ever, techniques for steering customers away from default choices, the concept of truth on menus and what annoys him most about eating out in restaurants. To read more about Sean have a look at the Menu Engineers website. Don’t forget, Cork Talk is now available on Spotify. You can listen to this week’s episode, plus my back catalogue of interviews with some of the world’s most extraordinary wine figures.