The restaurant menu is one of the fundamental components of the dining experience. And the key marketing tool for your establishment. A well-designed menu may increase your revenue while improving the customer experience. No matter whether it is printed, available online, or displayed above a counter.
For your business, build a visually stunning and user-friendly menu or advertisement. As a starting point, you can use pre-designed menu templates. Additionally, they look fantastic when used as design templates for restaurant advertising. The files may be modified to fit your own brand.
How many options ought to be available in a restaurant?
There are fewer than you may assume, to put it simply. Most individuals can only remember seven items of knowledge at a time, according to cognitive psychology specialist George A. Miller.
While classifying your menu items and limiting the options inside each category between three and seven is not a requirement.
it is recommended that you limit your menu to a maximum of seven things.
The days of a lengthy restaurant menu with a variety of choices are long behind us. A large menu can reduce revenue for the majority of restaurants due to underutilized or spoilt inventory.
See this post on the “why” behind the greatest menu design choices to gain additional insight into the psychology of menus.
The Influence of Good Menu Design on Restaurants
The way your restaurant’s menu is designed may make or break its financial success.
Your customers will order your least profitable item over others that are equally delicious but more profitable for your business. If it is prominently displayed on the menu. Your menu is your canvas if food is your medium of choice. Here is further information on how to arrange your menu items.
By providing modifiers to menu items and placing side dishes and add-ons where clients can readily be enticed by them. A well-designed menu may also help your waiter upsell. This opens the door to higher check averages.
Finally, you want your brand to be present on your menu, in your physical decor, on your website, on social media, and everywhere else that customers connect with your restaurant. As a result, an engaging and, most importantly, an unforgettable experience is produced.
We’ll take you through the 5 Steps to Making Your Own Restaurant Menu and designing a fresh or enhanced menu.
1. List each item on the menu
Learn how to compose a restaurant menu before you start designing. Make a list of all the meals you wish to serve using Excel, a Google Sheet, or even just ink and paper.
Because it’s simple to cut, copy, and paste various objects into Google Sheets, the sheet will instantly save, it’s ideal for this. To utilize our template, go here. For your own version, don’t forget to select File > Make a Copy.
2. Classify the menu items
Sort all the products into categories such as appetizers, main courses, desserts, and so on. Then, decide which menu items you want to stand out the most on the menu; for example, you might want appetizers to be the first item on your menu.
You might want a specific appetizer to be at the top of the list because it scored highly on your menu engineering worksheet for popularity and profitability. Put your menu items in the precise order that you want them to display on the menu by simply moving them around.
3. Set Menu Prices
Have you noticed that our spreadsheet is still missing any prices? That’s because prices aren’t set at random and they call for a thorough examination of food costs. Learning how to calculate menu prices for restaurants is time well spent.
The most important component of a restaurant meal menu is the pricing of the items on the menu and how you present them.
If you’re using a prior menu, include your current pricing before stepping back to evaluate them. Put yourself in the position of your consumers.
Could you afford to adjust the price of this menu item slightly to make it more enticing based on the restaurant sales statistics in your point-of-sale system?
4. Write menu summaries
The exciting part comes next: we haven’t used the sheet’s “description” column yet. Menu item descriptions might be created by a copywriter, but the finest ones come straight from the source and from the heart. Consult the chef who developed the menu items, and consider the history of each dish—its inspiration, and the location of its materials.
The time and work it took to prepare—and jot down a brief description of each item on your document.
When feasible, use descriptive and alluring words like crisp, tangy, sour, sweet, and crunchy. However, don’t overdo it.
5. Select a color scheme for the menu.
When you have all of your menu items listed on the page in a logical arrangement, stop gazing at the cells and start considering graphic design. For your menu, use colors that are representative of your restaurant’s identity. This may be as easy as determining which three colors you’d want to see on the menu or opting to print your menu in black and white to save money.
The psychology of restaurant color is a topic that might fill a whole blog post, but for now, here are a few colors websites and Chron’s article on the subject.
