Restructuring the cuisine menu navigation and tagging system
Since 2010, writers at The Infatuation have added cuisine tags as they published stories.
These cuisines, dishes, venues, and sometimes ingredients were all listed alphabetically under a general Cuisines navigation header.
Because each city team created its own tags, this led to incredibly long navigation menus, thin subsections that killed our SEO, and duplicate tags with slight variations (e.g. steak, steaks, steakhouse).
Our tags varied so much from city to city that a person wouldn’t be able to find the same info on a trip as they would in their home city.
This affected not just navigation menus, but also our ability to power personalization and AI tools, which are only as good as their data inputs. And because no one had previously had the bandwidth to do a tag audit, that backend data was messy and unreliable.
I decided to do a full audit of all our tags to find out what we did well, where we were losing SEO value, and how could we approach restructuring the data to address all department pain points.
A Focus on Cuisine Tags
For cuisines specifically, my challenge was to scrub the data to better power personalization tools and re-organize the taxonomy of our tags without hurting our SEO. The goal was to create a similar structure that could be replicated across all markets for a more consistent experience, while allowing cities to have unique menus reflective of their diverse dining scenes.
“How nuanced do we actually need to be?” was the first question I needed to answer. I dug into the data to find out.
The data showed that users consistently searched for and clicked on a handful of popular dishes and cuisines, with a drop-off in the numbers from there. However, each major market had its own specific mix of top-searched tags and popular cuisines that drove the vast majority of traffic.
I needed to figure out the balance between user behavior, SEO rankings, and cuisine variety. I even had to consult with our DEI lead, as due to geopolitical conflicts, the representation of cuisines could be misinterpreted as supporting one side or another.
The best way to bridge this was to reveal top dishes and cuisines together, as they had equal SEO and user interest value, then to tier the menu so we could reveal all the other cuisine tags for the smaller group of valued users who wanted more variety. This allowed us to show a diverse range of options while keeping the menu lightweight.
In collaboration with our SEO expert, I came up with the tiered menu system below, which supported our growth initiatives, reduced tag clutter for personalization, and cleaned up the UI for users.
The results:
🌍 Each major market received its own unique, localized mix of top cuisines and dishes.
🚀 Boosted our SEO by leading with expertise, leaning into our local authority, and building user trust.
🧠 Reduced cognitive load by tiering the data for faster navigation.
👯♀️ Eliminated duplicate cuisine tags to ensure data fidelity and improve tagging operations.
The first stage of my audit compared the NYC cuisine page to the LA cuisine page, to understand their similarities and differences.
An early idea that didn’t work: seeing if we could categorize cuisines by part of the world.
This failed for reasons of inclusion. Some cuisines are named after ethnic groups that have been forced from their homes and relocated due to war. Other cuisines cross regions — for example, “Mediterranean” technically applies to the 22 countries that border the Mediterranean Sea, which span Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
By choosing a tiered cuisine menu, we could show users what was popular and trending in New York, while also allowing them to drill down and view the full spectrum of nuanced cuisines that the city has to offer.
After a user clicks “View All” on the first tier, they are taken to this alphabetical menu, where they can see every type of cuisine and dish.
