The Best Ways to Set Up Restaurant Menus
A restaurant menu serves as both a marketing and informational tool. It reflects the personality of the restaurant and the clientele it hopes to attract as well as provides information about the kinds of food you serve, how they are prepared and pricing. The layout of the menu should be easy to read and have visually appealing color and style.
Other People Are Reading
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Keep It Simple
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Whether you serve breakfast, lunch and dinner or just one meal at your restaurant, keep the menu layout practical and organized with simple categories like breakfast, appetizers, salads, soups, lunch, dinner, entrees, side dishes, beverages, desserts, cocktails, beer and wine. Choose a large, eye-catching font for the headines with a slightly smaller but different font for the descriptions and prices. Avoid fancy or tiny fonts that are hard to read. Use columns to organize categories, keeping in mind that menu pages with single columns are considered the most elegant. If your menu has ethnic or culturally inspired items that are hard to pronounce, include numbers next to the selections to make ordering easier.
Attention Grabbers
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Typically, people look at the top right-hand corner of a menu first, which makes that a perfect place to highlight your house specialty or featured menu item of the day on a small card that can be easily replaced. Their eyes then typically scan down to the middle of the page, where it is recommended you place the most expensive items on the menu. While most patrons do not order the highest price item, placing comparable and slightly less costly selections above and beneath that item increases their sales.
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Accent Your Assets
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If you have dishes on the menu that are local favorites, have won awards, received glowing reviews or garner exceptional praise from regular customers, feature them prominently on the menu. Use welcoming phrases like, "Ask your waitperson about...." or, "Try our award-winning..." You can place a decorative border around the item, use a different ink color to make it stand out, or paperclip a card to the menu to draw attention.
Freshen Frequently
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Instruct hosts and servers to listen for customer feedback so you can make the menu more patron-friendly. For example, if customers repeatedly ask where the salad dressing selections are listed, make sure the layout for the next menu makes them easy to spot. Keep up with local and national food trends and add a new item to the menu every month or so, being sure to highlight it with a star or other graphic so customers will notice it.
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References
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