The design of your menu is an important means of presenting your restaurant. Restaurant entrepreneurs use creative menu design to reinforce the restaurant’s theme or ambiance, set the proper tone, and most importantly, to sell some food. It’s pretty easy to convince us at One Fat Frog to eat something, but other customers need a little more nudging.
A menu should make people imagine this
Think of the distinctive restaurant menus that you’ve seen and what they say. Menus on simple white paper say “we’re cheap; come and get a $5 sandwich with a pickle wedge on the side.” The ornate script of Brio Tuscan Grille invites you to sit down for a classy Italian meal where the atmosphere and presentation are as important as the delicious meals. The stylized menu of a restaurant like Spice Modern Steakhouse indicates a progressive and modern dining experience.
The restaurant entrepreneur needs to make a lot of decision when it comes to restaurant menu design. Is the drink menu part of the food menu or separate? How thick should it be? What kind of paper? What font? Will there be pictures of the meals? Where will the price be?
That last decision is often overlooked when planning a restaurant startup, but the location of the price on the menu is very important. Are they all lined up? If so, there’s an employee here, let’s just call him Cheap Frog, who will look down the row of prices and then choose the cheapest item on the menu. He’s the kind of guy who does his grocery shopping based on what’s buy one, get one free, pays for his drinks with a handful of quarters, and never goes anywhere without a Groupon. Don’t make it that easy for him. If the prices aren’t lined up, customers aren’t given the subconscious urge to compare the prices. Many restaurants don’t put the price on the menu at all, but this is generally only a good idea at high-end restaurants, where penny pinchers like Cheap Frog won’t eat.
Restaurant entrepreneurs need to think of their menu as the first chance to put their good foot forward. This is where the customer finds out what you have to offer and decide whether they want to order. Think of it as being like One Fat Frog’s new 10,000 square-foot restaurant equipment showroom. You use the restaurant menu to give customers a tour of everything you offer. Make sure the tour is an impressive one.