Your menu is among the first things your customers will engage with at your restaurant. Ensuring your menu leaves a great first impression is essential for many reasons.
Your customers will immediately feel like they've made the perfect restaurant choice if your menu is attractive, well-written, and cohesive with your brand. A well-designed menu may also significantly influence income by highlighting lucrative menu items and creating a positive first impression with customers.While it may be tempting to concentrate just on aesthetics, a menu redesign will be far more successful if you've done a menu engineering analysis to determine the competitiveness and appeal of your menu options. Then, draw the reader's attention to your most profitable goods by using that information to your advantage when constructing your menu.
On the other hand, it will be difficult for your cuisine and service to make up for a menu with too many choices, lousy phrasing, unappealing photographs, or an awkward design.
You may use these restaurant menu design ideas and solutions to help you decide on the layout of your menu.
Discover how to design a restaurant menu:
1. Investigate The Contest
Check out what other restaurants are doing with their menus. First, examine the costs, themes, and cuisine. Then, discover when they usually give mouthwatering discounts. This would allow you to create your menu and offerings to compete with theirs and prevail. Think of providing something that they don't.
2. Your Menu Should Be A Manageable Size
To avoid throwing food away at the end of the night, resist the need to give a wide variety of dishes. Also, consider the output your restaurant's kitchen is proficient in. For example, are there enough food stations to provide baked products, salads, soups, and roasted and sautéed dishes?
Offering only a few options to your consumers is another aspect of manageability. People who have too many alternatives may become confused or worse, they may unconsciously become stressed. Try to limit the number of dishes you serve to seven or eight per category or division.
3. It Should Be Simple To Read
If you have too much information, you don't want to engulf them. Resist using too extensive culinary language and maintain your menu design basic. You may always utilize the amuse-bouche in the explanation, but keep the item caption straightforward. A menu with a font too small to read without squinting is undoubtedly off-putting, as is one that is too large and awkward to hold.
4. Verify The Accurate Food Cost
To maintain profits and provide your clients with affordable rates, every item on your restaurant menu must be charged to match the cost of the ingredients. Know how much it costs to prepare each dish. A costly cuisine requires pricey ingredients, like lobster.
Since quality is the most crucial factor when developing menu items, this recommendation does not imply that you should buy the cheapest cuisine available. Instead, you should strike a balance between lower and higher food prices for a good return.
5. Use Some Psychology
Studies have shown that customers engage in frequent activities when glancing at menus. For example, if you put your most costly, highest-quality entrée front and center, people will glance at it before turning to whatever is listed just beneath it, maybe something they can more readily afford.
A menu item you wish to emphasize, possibly one that will bring in a little money, is an excellent choice for this spot. It's what your clients will notice first. Diners—neither first nor last, rarely look at the backside of a menu. Don't stow the items you want to promote in a place where no one will likely read them. If your menu opens up, the same rule should apply to the lower-left area of the page's left side.
Apply color effectively. Pick those with specific psychological impacts from research. A viewer's attention is drawn to yellow. According to some reviewers, red makes diners hungry.
You should not use columns. When a menu is presented in this fashion, customers often focus on price and choose the entry with the lowest price. As a result, they frequently have a detrimental subconscious impact.
6. Lessen The Choices
According to Bournemouth University research, there is a happy medium between having too few and excessive menu options. The selection of restaurants is already overwhelming for diners. Only have customers search through several choices once they've decided on your establishment.
Additionally, each item on the menu must be distinct to aid your customers in making a choice. Although serving two different steak dishes may give the impression of abundance. In reality, doing so just makes it more difficult for visitors to decide and puts the two meals in direct competition.
A lengthy menu might also reduce sales: Your front-of-house employees will serve fewer guests throughout a service if it takes more time for customers to make their orders since it delays the table turn time. A small menu is significantly easier to handle for the back-of-house activities and can result in better execution of each item.
7. Consider Using Pictures
According to renowned menu developer Gregg Rapp, a nice-looking picture next to a food item raises its sales by 30%. However, a word of advice: Avoid using subpar images on your social media or in your menu. A lack of photos is preferable to poor pictures.
Remember that you may write down your restaurant's Instagram username on the menu with a call-out like "check out our Instagram if you want to see any of our meals"- If you don't want to add images to the menu because printing can be pretty costly. You may also include a QR code or a bit.ly link for simple access. Ensure you routinely refresh your Instagram with stunning new photographs.
8. Keep Your Personality And Brand True
The menu should complement your restaurant identity. Beyond the foods you choose, the color scheme, typeface, spacing, and structure are all crucial to conveying the look and feel you want. The menu at a bar will differ significantly from a fine dining establishment. Likewise, a sit-down restaurant's menu will be different.
One of the best restaurant advertising ideas is to design with your consumer, the cuisine, and the concept in mind but always stay loyal to your brand.
9. Highlight Certain Menu Items
Using what business insiders refer to as "eye magnets," menus highlight specific things that restaurants would like you to purchase in the same way that newspapers and magazines include "call-out" phrases to emphasize critical bits of information. Anything that draws the eye is considered an "eye magnet," as the name suggests.
It may be a picture of the food, an image or graphic, a box with color or shading, a border, or another attention-grabbing element.
10. Menu Design Is Important!
One element of a good restaurant strategy is intelligent menu design: Ensure your menu showcases your most popular and lucrative items while reflecting your style and cuisine.
Creative Menu Design Checklist
- Highlight Center Space
- Don’t Forget White space
- Make It Visually Appealing
- Keep Prices Hidden
- Highlight Special Cuisine
- Add Special Corner For Best-Sellers
- Think About Size And Shape
- Use High-Quality Pictures
- Play With Color Psychology
Do you need a menu created for your café, restaurant, or bar? Reach out to our designers at Best POS for unique restaurant promotion ideas.
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