Once you’ve established what type of restaurant that you are and the prices of the items on your menu, it’s time to take the plunge and design your menu for maximum profitability.
Make Your Menu Match Your Restaurant
People will associate the type of restaurant that you are with the menu that you have, so if you have a fine dining establishment, people would be thrown off by having handwritten menus on cheap paper. Conversely, they would be thrown off by seeing a burger place with fine-dining menu holders.
Names and Descriptions Should Be Appetizing
You actually have some leeway here. If you’re one of those establishments who likes to be experimental, you can make unappealing descriptions to see what the customers should say. If you’re at a loss as to how to write these descriptions, hire a menu consultant – they usually have writers on staff.
Don’t be Afraid of Pictures
Pictures are great, though don’t overdo them. You shouldn’t have more than around three pictures per section, else it gets incredibly crowded. Hire a professional food photographer to make them look good, rather than just taking pictures of your dishes under the food warmers.
Take the Desserts and Drinks Away
The desserts and drinks should be on separate menus from the main menu. Here at Restaurant Supply, we’ve seen many restaurants group the alcoholic drinks, the chocolate decadence, and the handcrafted sodas all in one place. Bringing out the dessert menu, or leaving it in acrylics on the table get people thinking about your tasty desserts for the entirety of the meal.
Bring Your Restaurant to the Table
The menu that you have should be the embodiment of your restaurant. Its playfulness, its panache, its seriousness, and its passion should be seen through all of it. You wouldn’t have gotten into the restaurant business if you didn’t have at least some love of food, right?
This is by no means an exhaustive list of what you can do for designing your menu. The best thing that you can do for yourself is to get some things out on the page and then alter it when you see how things sell.
