A menu is essential to the success of any restaurant business. When well-designed, it goes beyond showcasing food items and directly influences revenue generation.
The problem is that creating a well-designed professional menu takes time. It’s also an overwhelming process for most restaurant operators because you must consider several design elements and find ways to integrate all these elements to create an appealing and effective menu.
To make things easier for you, this guide demonstrates how to create a restaurant menu step-by-step. We’ll highlight different aspects of menu design psychology to help you create a compelling menu that works well for your specific type of restaurant.
The Importance of a Well-Designed Menu
A professionally designed restaurant menu takes up different roles in an establishment and offers several benefits. Some of these include:
- It acts as your restaurant’s business card. A good menu communicates your restaurant’s identity, showcasing your offerings and culinary strengths.
- It works as a silent salesperson. Besides guiding customers on what they’ll order, your menu can influence how much they’ll spend. If you place your best offerings strategically, you’ll make more sales and generate more revenue.
- It is a reliable marketing tool. You can use your restaurant menu to make your signature dishes stand out and retain your regular customers while attracting new ones.
- It sets dining expectations. A well-designed menu is an extension of the restaurant’s branding and interior décor. If you get it right, it can reflect your restaurant’s ambiance and quality standards, helping to create a memorable dining experience for customers.
- It helps to control price. A successful restaurant menu allows you to control the prices of your menu offerings. You can strategically change prices to reflect current food market prices without losing customers.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Before creating your menu, you need to understand your target audience. This is crucial because your target audience determines your business offerings and services. Knowing who you want to sell to will help you prepare an effective menu that attracts the right customers.
In the food business, understanding your target audience requires you to analyze three different aspects – customer demographics, psychographics, and behavior. Let’s look at each in turn:
Demographics
Analyzing your target audience’s demographics for menu creation involves looking at different components:
- Age/generation – different generations have different dining preferences and spending habits. Millennials, for example, eat out more often than other generations, as nearly 53% eat out once a week. They also prefer fresh, natural ingredients over anything else. So, if millennials are your target audience, you’re likely to make more profit if your menu reflects this.
- Income – are your target customers high-, middle-, or low-income earners? Understanding this will help you determine your menu prices.
Psychographics
Your target market’s psychographics are their personality and personal preferences. These include their interests, values, and attitudes towards food in general. It can range from individuals who love healthy meals and a lively dining atmosphere to those who prefer comfort, fast food, and the upbeat energy associated with sports games.
For example, most millennials prioritize sustainability and ethics. They may also prefer fine and casual dining over traditional fast foods.
Behavior and Habits
Behavior and habits include activities and food-buying habits of your target market based on their psychographics and social situations. Millennial working parents with kids will likely have different dining needs than those who are single and ready to mingle. They may prefer visiting restaurants with family-friendly features and a kids’ menu.
After analyzing your target customer’s demographics, psychographics, and behavior, create a profile of your ideal customers. Your customer profile describes your customer or set of customers’ demographic and psychographic characteristics, buying behavior, and creditworthiness.
The profiles you create will guide you to the right concept and menu items during the first few steps of the menu creation process below. Remember, your menu must match your customer profile’s palate preferences if you want to run a profitable establishment.
Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Restaurant Menu
With your target audience in mind, follow the steps below to create a great menu that will help you run a successful restaurant.
Step 1: Define Your Restaurant’s Concept
The first step to creating a successful restaurant menu is to define your establishment’s concept. What’s your service style, theme, and ambiance? Is it a plant-based establishment looking to recreate classic comfort foods? An intimate fine-dining restaurant with a farm-to-table flair? Or, a fast-casual food joint that serves on-the-go meals?
Having a well-defined restaurant concept will shape your menu offerings and business operations. Say you’re a fine-dining restaurant with a farm-to-table flair. You can highlight exotic ingredients and complex dishes in your menu offerings to attract guests who appreciate a high-end dining experience.
You may also need to create separate menus for different dishes or days. For example, you could have a lunch menu for midday mealtimes, a dinner menu for the evenings, a drinks menu, and a wine menu. Or, create a special brunch menu with a combination of breakfast and lunch food items offered on weekends.
This breaks up your offerings instead of having only one primary menu that showcases all the food and drink options you offer that might overwhelm your customers.
In contrast, if you’re a family-style establishment, you'll likely want to offer a selection of hearty, more comforting menu offerings to serve a broader demographic.
A few things to consider and questions to answer when building your concept include:
- What’s your inspiration for opening the restaurant?
- What’s your desired atmosphere and style of service? Is it fine dining, family-style, buffet, or food truck?
- How will you source your ingredients? Local suppliers? Imported specialties? Organic production?
You may also want to consider the values behind your business operations. These can include any environmental conservation motives or culinary technique innovations. For example, if your concept is about culinary innovation inspired by various cultural heritages, you can provide unique ingredient combinations in your menu.
Just remember, the concept you choose should align with the tastes of the customer profiles you established earlier. It should also communicate your restaurant’s uniqueness and personality. What would your target clientele get from your establishment that they cannot get from similar joints anywhere else?
Step 2: Compile a List of Your Menu Items
Once you have a well-defined restaurant concept, prepare a comprehensive list of all the menu items you intend to offer. You can do this on paper, Excel, or Google Sheets.
Then, organize the menu items into categories. You can group them by courses, such as appetizers, main dishes, and desserts, or by sections, such as drinks, breakfast, starters, soups, lunch, dinner. Doing this will help you select the most fitting restaurant menu template in the next step.
When organizing your menu items, evaluate all the dishes to see if they’re diverse enough and can appeal to a broad audience. Specifically, check if your offerings cater to popular dietary preferences and restrictions. These may be gluten-free, keto-friendly, vegetarian, and vegan options.
A good menu should have several food choices, catering to various tastes and preferences. However, be careful not to have too many options as this may be counterproductive.
Too many options overwhelm customers, making it harder for them to choose what to eat. They can also complicate inventory, slow things down in the kitchen, and affect customer service.
Step 3: Design Your Menu
After listing your offerings, it’s time to design your menu. This is where menu psychology techniques come into play. You want to create your menu in a way that captures your target audience’s attention while subtly influencing what they’ll order. Here are a few tips, tricks, and techniques to help you design a great menu.
Choose a Suitable Menu Layout
On average, diners spend about 109 seconds looking at a menu before deciding what to order. The menu layout influences how your guests interpret your menu offerings and how clearly or easily they absorb the message you’re trying to convey within these few seconds.
Effective restaurant menus match your establishment's concept and interior design theme to create a compelling and cohesive brand identity. So, if you’re working with a minimalist theme, select a menu design layout that emphasizes simplicity and clarity to create an uncluttered, clean look rather than an elaborate decorative design.
If you’re going with a vintage theme, incorporate design elements specific to a particular past era to evoke a sense of authenticity in your layout. For a modern or classic theme, choose a layout featuring clean lines and bold typography to create a sleek, elegant, fresh look and feel.
The most important concept to understand when selecting a menu layout is visual hierarchy. That is, arranging various menu design elements to guide the guests’ eye to read through your food items in a particular order of importance. Choose a layout that allows you to position certain dishes along specific gazing patterns to call attention to them.
Select the Right Colors
Color is one of the most essential elements of a restaurant's interior décor. It affects guests’ perception of a dining space and evokes various emotional responses, ultimately shaping their overall dining experience. Similarly, your menu’s colors affect how guests perceive or relate to your food. It can influence their hunger levels and willingness to choose certain dishes.
Generally, red, orange, and yellow are appetite-stimulating colors. Red is also quite striking. Guests might find it easier to remember red food images, leading to repeat business. Green, on the other hand, is often associated with nature, health, and freshness. It might work best if you’re offering a plant-based cuisine.
For a more upscale establishment with a relaxed vibe, consider working with blue to create a sense of calmness, serenity, and relaxation. But if you want to create a more sophisticated, elegant, and luxurious vibe with a sense of exclusivity, working with black as the dominant color will do.
Always consider picking a central color and pairing it with other complementary colors to create an eye-catching menu that strategically highlights popular or most profitable dishes without overwhelming customers. Also, ensure your menu’s colors are consistent with your branding and interior décor to give customers a unified experience.
Include High-Quality Photos
Photos are to a menu what mannequin displays are to a retail store. They capture potential customers’ attention to specific items and increase the likelihood that they’ll make a purchase. But be careful not to overdo it. In this case, less is more.
Also, your food photos must be high-quality for them to work. Blurry pictures might do the opposite and discourage your guests from ordering. Try to ensure your food images closely resemble the meals you’ll serve. Otherwise, you won’t fulfill customer expectations, reducing customer satisfaction.
When incorporating high-quality food photos in your menu, aim to complement the text rather than overpower it. Some essential tips to help you use photos effectively in your menu include:
- Balancing text and images – balance your food photos and text to avoid cluttering your menu with food images or icons, as these may divert your customers’ attention from the main content.
- Adequate spacing – use enough white space between photos and text to make them pop and increase visual appeal.
- Size matters – oversized images will dominate the page and distract customers from the menu descriptions, while small photos may not be appealing. Find the right image size for the menu layout you’ve chosen.
- Strategic placement – to avoid visual overload and highlight your best dishes, place your photos strategically on the page. Consider using a small high-quality image alongside the description of each menu item instead of having multiple images scattered all over the page.
You can also have one standout photo for every menu section instead of an image for each item. Consider working with a professional food photographer and a food stylist to produce compelling images customized to your restaurant’s brand and get all these elements right.
Choose Suitable Menu Fonts
The best fonts for a restaurant menu should be clean and sharp to create contrast between the texts, images, and background. For this, you want to:
- Use easy-to-read fonts. Clear Sans-serif fonts, such as Helvetica, Verdana, and Arial, are some of the most popular font choices for restaurant menu design because they’re legible.
- Limit the number of fonts you use to two. You’ll maintain an organized appearance this way.
- Use font variations and different font sizes to highlight certain menu items. You can use bold or italics to emphasize a specific point, e.g., highlighting allergens.
It’s best to start with a blank template when designing your menu. You'll have more room to personalize your design and amplify your space’s unique qualities. However, you can also use free menu templates from the web to streamline your menu design process. For a more scalable alternative, use a restaurant menu maker. You’ll get more food menu templates with different customization options and can create a unique menu with this.
Step 4: Write Enticing Descriptions
Next, entice customers by writing vivid menu descriptions. These need to be informative, inviting, and accurate to be effective. Some tips to keep in mind when writing menu descriptions include:
- Highlight significant ingredients. If you’re using unique ingredients in your dishes, mention their origin to demonstrate the exceptional quality of your menu offerings. Doing this also conveys your brand’s values. For example, if your establishment uses ingredients from local organic farms, it communicates your commitment to community-building and dedication to sustainability.
- Highlight cooking techniques. If you use any distinctive cooking techniques to prepare your meals, mention them in your descriptions to enhance your guests’ cultural experience. Terms like smoked, wood-fired, pan-seared, or char-grilled indicate culinary expertise and can evoke specific tastes or aromas.
- Add nutritional details. Sharing nutritional information such as calories works well for health-conscious restaurants. It helps build trust with customers. You'll earn their loyalty and build your authority in the niche.
- Use expressive language, but avoid exaggeration. Use adjectives such as succulent and crisp to vividly and accurately describe your dishes. But don’t exaggerate because you’ll fail to satisfy your customers’ taste buds and lose their trust.
- Address dietary restrictions. Indicate potential allergens such as peanuts, wheat, and eggs to help customers make safe food choices. It shows you care about your guests’ health and will help you become the go-to restaurant for many. You can highlight crucial information in your descriptions using specific icons or symbols, color coding, bolding, or adding footnotes or sidebars. If you use icons or symbols, ensure you include a key explaining what they mean to help your customers understand your offerings.
Step 5: Decide on Pricing
Menu pricing affects how your target audience perceives the value and quality of your meals. For instance, pricing a premium menu item higher than others makes it seem more reasonably priced.
Ideally, you want to set prices that are attractive to guests and profitable for your establishment. To do this, first, analyze the cost of each dish.
A detailed food cost analysis involves calculating the cost of ingredients, overhead expenses, and preparation or labor costs. In so doing, you’ll know which dishes are the most profitable and can draw attention to these items in your menu to make more. You’ll also identify which menu items require a price adjustment or a reconfiguration of ingredients to ensure healthy margins.
After determining your food costs, choose a pricing strategy. Menu pricing strategies vary between upscale and more budget-friendly restaurants.
For upscale establishments, pricing often reflects the exclusivity or quality of the ingredients. These spaces thrive on setting higher prices to convey luxury, allowing customers to expect a fine dining experience.
In contrast, more budget-friendly restaurants focus on offering value for money and ensuring each offering remains profitable. Here, you may want to bundle dishes and offer add-ons or seasonal specials to attract budget-conscious guests without diminishing value.
Price Placement
Another essential aspect of menu pricing worth noting is price placement on the menu. You can place your menu prices after the description so customers don’t focus much on it. This way, they’ll choose their food based on what they want to have rather than prices.
Some establishments place all their prices in a column, far from the menu descriptions, to draw more attention to the dish’s visual appeal and less to the costs. However, this strategy might work against you if customers read the prices first because it’s easier for them to see and choose the more affordable options.
Also, omitting currency symbols and rounding up menu prices makes them seem more affordable. Most guests become increasingly price-conscious when they see the $ currency symbol or if the menu prices end in specific amounts, such as $9.88.
Step 6: Run a Trial of Your Menu
Test your menu before launching it officially to gather feedback and adjust it accordingly. You can host a few tasting events for friends and family for this. During these events, focus on your guests’ reactions to every menu item they order to gain valuable insight into your restaurant menu’s appeal and functionality.
To gauge customer satisfaction levels, use comment cards or speak to the guests directly and collect their honest feedback. You may also want to conduct A/B testing for various menu aspects, including:
- Menu descriptions – describe the same dish differently and see which version resonates more.
- Layout variations – try different menu layouts or positioning of menu items to see which configurations generate more sales.
- Pricing strategies – test different prices for various dishes to establish a balance between perceived item value and profitability.
The goal is to refine your physical or digital menu, converting it into an effective tool that promotes operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Step 7: Promote the Menu
After making the necessary modifications based on the feedback from your trial run, promote your menu to attract your target audience. One of the most effective ways to promote your menu is through various online platforms.
You can do this by uploading high-resolution images of your menu photos on different social media platforms. Ensure these photos accentuate various food textures for optimum visual appeal. You may also share engaging short clips of various menu items under preparation on Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms. Or, run online campaigns to promote diverse menu items by offering time-limited offers and discounts on some dishes, encouraging potential customers to try them out.
Step 8: Update Your Menu Regularly
With time, you’ll notice what dishes resonate best with your customers and contribute the most to your restaurant sales. And which ones need improvement or replacement. Update your menu regularly to incorporate these observations and ensure your establishment remains competitive.
A good rule of thumb to work with is revisiting your menu every 6-12 months to assess the performance of each menu item. Take your time to categorize each item into the following buckets:
- High profitability, high popularity items. Commonly called the stars, these dishes fetch the most and deserve extra promotion.
- High profitability, low popularity. Usually referred to as puzzle dishes, these items bring in money but could use extra help to make them more popular and enhance sales. Consider running specials or online promotion campaigns to boost interest.
- Low profitability, high popularity. These dishes are known as the plowhorses. They bring customers in but don’t make you money and can hurt your bottom line. You may want to reduce their serving size or increase their prices to increase profitability.
- Low profitability, low popularity menu items. Often called dogs, this category of dishes is a challenge because they lead to losses. It’s best to remove them and introduce new, creative dishes.
Updating your menu is also necessary to incorporate changes in supplier pricing and seasonal availability of ingredients. Besides this, keep your menu fresh and dynamic to make customers’ dining experiences exciting and encourage repeat visits. You can achieve this by offering seasonal menu items or regular weekly or monthly specials.
If you host events in your restaurant space, consider offering unique menu combinations tailored to each event to enhance customer satisfaction. You can use event hosting platforms, like Perfect Venue, to create custom menus for different events within minutes.
Key Takeaways
A good restaurant menu contributes to the sustained growth of your food venture. It is the only form of published advertising you’re sure almost 100% of your guests will read. Our guide should help you create a menu that can adapt to print and digital formats. This flexibility is crucial to cater to potential guests who prefer exploring a restaurant’s menu options online before visiting in person.
Also, listen to your customers’ feedback, constantly analyze your numbers, and don’t be afraid to adjust your offerings based on new findings. Customers care more about their dining experience and will always appreciate changes that make their experiences more memorable and exciting.
If you're an event venue manager and menu planning takes up your time and energy, check out Perfect Venue. Its easy-to-use features can simplify your venue management tasks and help you generate more revenue. You can book a free demo today to see how the platform will transform your operations.
