The restaurant menu is where your diners can begin their gastronomic journey. You can entice or discourage guests from dining in or coming back depending on how it looks and how it compares to the actual food. How can you make a menu that is well constructed and fits your diners’ preferences? The answer might be much simpler than you thought.
Stick to a Standard
If you’re going into a cafe or pizza business, you need to create a standard level of quality for your menus. Do you have inspiration for your design? Can you imagine keeping your menu consistently presentable through the years?
Look online or ask an expert for ideas on how to make your restaurant or cafe menu visually stunning, but also easy to navigate. A simple layout also makes it easier for you to change the sizes of the menus you want to show your diners, such as table menus, posters, and even pamphlets for passersby.
Know Your Diners
The menu is where your guests can plan their entire dinner at a snap. It has to match not only your theme but the price point of your expected guests. Put the most popular dishes in front and the drinks and desserts at the back, so it’s much easier for them to find what they’re looking for. A hungry diner on a budget will also appreciate seeing meal options for less than the basic a la carte offers.
Visuals and Descriptions Matter
Have you ever seen a poster, banner, or picture of a burger and then thought it would look exactly the same in real life? Then finally, when you get a chance to order it, the food in front of you looks like it’s never seen the advertisement before? Yes, that’s misleading and deceptive marketing at its best, or worst.
If you want people to trust you and the food you sell them, make your pictures look good but avoid exaggerating your descriptions and imagery just to appeal to hungry or easily swayed diners. Avoid hyperboles and use straightforward and practical descriptions to make it easier to deliver your promises.
Hire Professionals
If you’re not in the business of visual design and in creating menus, then you should hire an expert to make your menu for you. If you have the photos and the descriptions ready but have no format in your mind, they can take care of laying everything out according to your specifications.
If you’ve got no idea how to take photos and describe the dishes on your own, there are also professionals who can do that for you. Just remember to feed them what’s on the menu so they can have a more personal relationship with the food they’re photographing and describing.
If the front of your restaurant is the face and the kitchen is the heart, then your menu is the eye. In there, your customers can see everything they need to know about your business. They can judge if it’s worth it or not simply by the visuals, the description, and how organized everything becomes. Let your menu reflect the quality of your work.
