I just play dumb and ask for a physical menu, claiming that my phone broke this morning. Adapt the experiment for the number of people. With 2, the other one might say "and I'm out of battery". 3 could be "mine I forgot at home". And 4+ people are already too many to reasonably expect customers to share a single phone between them all.
It's all just a social experiment which hopefully ends up trickling up and making owners aware how stupid it is to expect everyone to bring a phone in their pockets in order to being able to order food.
Some times it's not even a lie: as part of mentally cleaning up from an intense addiction to social media, I've forced myself into offline mode and purposely leave the phone at home from time to time.
One time my phone was getting terrible reception in the restaurant, and couldn't download the way-too-big menu file. I ask the server for a paper menu, and apparently they'd went all-in on paper-free, so no menu for me. Instead, the server had to present their iPad to me so I could see all the software buttons for the items I could choose from as they scrolled through. Ridiculous. The next time I went they had paper menus.
It's for fun. I just want to have them making the effort to realize that they shouldn't drop physical menus altogether.
Also some times I didn't feel like doing the theatrics, and upon asking for a menu, they'd say "it's there in the QR code, please scan it" and leave me to it, as if they had done a good job. Not on my watch!
It's all just a social experiment which hopefully ends up trickling up and making owners aware how stupid it is to expect everyone to bring a phone in their pockets in order to being able to order food.
Some times it's not even a lie: as part of mentally cleaning up from an intense addiction to social media, I've forced myself into offline mode and purposely leave the phone at home from time to time.