How to Create a Restaurant Menu Card

Running a restaurant and keeping pace in the highly competitive food business can be a challenge. Restaurant owners need all the advantages they can get, not only to bring customers into their restaurant, but to impress them during their visit. Atmosphere, along with great food and good service, is important to the success of your restaurant. An easy-to-read, well-designed menu can go a long way toward helping to establish a friendly, inviting atmosphere.

Things You'll Need

• Desktop publishing software
• Printer

Instructions

1. Design your menu. Determine what color you want and on what type of paper. Do you want a menu that will be fancy or more down home? Consider categorizing your food into general sections like "Appetizers," "Entrees," "Desserts" and "Drinks." Include a special section of the menu for kids. You might even want a section strictly for daily or weekly specials.

2. Take pictures of some of your most popular dishes or your signature dishes. You want the photos to be appealing and preferably in color.

3. Write descriptions of each dish that give details about how the dish is cooked and its main ingredients. Write the descriptions in as appealing a manner as you can. You want the descriptions to make your customers' mouths water.

4. Use a word processor like Microsoft Word or a desktop publishing program like Microsoft Publisher to put the menu together. You can also use a free desktop publishing program like Serif PagePlus (see resources). These programs allow you to use pre-defined menu templates or customize your own to easily add text and insert photos of your restaurant dishes. You can add borders of all types to give your menu a professional look, customize the font and arrange your food categories any way you like.

5. Save your finished menu as a PDF and take it to a local printer to have copies of your menu printed and laminated. Your printer will have several ideas for paper choice. Go with something simple if your restaurant is fast food or very relaxed. Choose something textured in richer, darker colors if your restaurant is classier. Try to match the paper and design to fit the decor of your restaurant to enhance the visual aspect of your customers' dining experience.

References

• http://www.quantifiedmarketing.com/learning_center/restaurant-menu-design.php

Resources

• Serif PagePlus