I met some friends at a Wallingford bar the other night and we wanted food with our drinks. And they served food; they had a kitchen. The problem was ordering it.

The bartender told me I couldn't order through him, that I had to scan the QR code on the bar and do it that way. I looked at the thing. “What if somebody doesn't have a phone?” I asked. “Doesn't have a phone?” he said, then made a face. I told him, “Last week I went to the Chris Rock concert where they made you put your phone into one of those locked bags, so I just didn't bring it. But at the restaurant beforehand, it was a QR code for the menu so I was SOL.” The bartender told me some girl recently claimed she didn't have her phone, but she did; he saw her using it later.

Anyway, that's where we are now. Menus have apparently been around since 1100 A.D. but in less than 15 years the smartphone has all but wiped them away. At the pre-Chris Rock dinner, when I said I had no phone, they didn't bring me a menu; they brought me an iPad.

Still a few bugs in the system, too. QR stands for Quick Response but sometimes it's not quick nor a response. At the Wallingford bar, my friend tried to order for our table via the QR code but after he inputted all the orders it kept asking for our table. He would respond and it would ask again. He's the calmest person in the world but after 10 minutes he began to curse a blue streak. One of the people who worked there owned up: “Yeah, it's not you. It doesn't work right sometimes.”

In the end, we downed our drinks and walked over to Chutneys Bistro, which still has physical menus, and where I had some of the best Indian food I've had in years.