The menu is everything to your restaurant, the reason that you got into business in the first place. Developing your menu can be a tough proposition. You don’t want the ingredients to be too expensive, but you also want to provide the best quality that you can for the money that you do spend.
Everything about your menu influences the restaurant. If you love to cook with wine, you’ll need to have that wine on hand. If you are a burger joint, then you probably want to have ground beef around.
Determine the cuisine
You have an amazing choice of cuisines available to you. The key to success on this is to go with the cuisine that you’re passionate about and can cook well. French? Not a problem. Down home Southern? Bring on the barbeque!
If you’ve not opened the restaurant yet, you have the choice about how you want to handle this question. If you’re serving fast casual, you want to have items on the menu which you can quickly serve. If you’re serving formal cuisine, you probably don’t want to whip out the mac and cheese.
How will you serve it?
- A la carte – Everything that’s on the menu is separate. You pay a set price for each item that’s on the menu, with no combinations. This is compared to the table d’hote menu, which consists of groups of items that have a fixed price.
- Mixed menu – The mixed menu is a mixture of a la carte and table d’hote items. So, you might have the corned beef hash and eggs combo right next to two eggs scrambled. This is the way that most restaurants do it, to give the impression of value to their customers.
- Buffet – The customers receive no choice in what’s served, they merely have a number of items from which to choose. The buffet style is great for those chefs who like to cook a little bit of everything.
Static menu or rotation?
Will you stay static and serve the same thing every day, or will your menu cycle seasonally, daily, or monthly. We’ve got one ‘down home’ restaurant here which has several staples, but they rotate out some of the entrees for variety.
Who are you cooking for?
This depends on where your restaurant is located. If you’re catering to the geriatric set, you might want to stick with traditional high-quality items. If you’re looking at college students, then you’re free to get pretty crazy and try out combinations.
How complicated is the item to make?
If the item takes 37 steps and a blessing from the Pope, chances are you don’t want it on the menu. On the other hand, if you’re looking at something that is relatively easy to make and makes your restaurant look good, that’s a whole other story.
The answers to all of these questions determine what your menu will look like to your customers. It also determines the types of restaurant equipment that you’ll need in your place. Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about the pricing of menu items.
Thanks go to Sameer Vasta for the Creative Commons use of the picture
