Essential Restaurant Menu Design Tips To Keep in Mind

Is a menu important for a restaurant business? The answer is a big- Yes. Well, the menu serves as the business card for the restaurant business. It not only sets the tone for the restaurant but can also create a great impression on the mind of the customers. Hence, coming up with a beautiful restaurant menu design is very important. Only then engaging the visitors and turning them into repeat customers is very easy. 

Well, restaurant owners can easily come up with interesting menu cards. They can take the help of menu designers or use the menu templates, whichever seems suitable for coming up with interactive menu designs.

 

In the following post you will get to learn about the basics of menu designing that needs to be followed before the custom menu printing process starts. What are you waiting for? Take a look below:

 

● Menu Basics

 

An ideal restaurant menu should provide a perfect balance of the traditional and new or customized dishes. Also, the right food cost must be maintained so that it helps to increase the profit of the restaurant and at the same time ensure it isn’t too costly for the customers. So before starting with the menu design, a restaurant owner should sit down with the team to decide on the items that they would like to include in the menu. It must be kept in mind that the restaurant menu should be designed in such a way that it reflects the restaurant theme perfectly to the target audience.

 

● Pricing

 

No matter what type of food a restaurant is serving, the pricing should be considered carefully. Assessing the food cost based on the portion you are going to serve or the ingredients you have used. While deciding the menu pricing it’s essential to make sure there is a perfect balance between costly and less costly dishes.

 

If there isn’t a perfect balance between the two, customers will either go on ordering less costly one or won’t order too expensive one. Both have drawbacks. For instance if a menu has too many low cost items it won’t bring profit for the restaurant; similarly, too many costly items might lead to losing potential customers as they might not be ready to shell out excess money. Another way to ensure a profit is to create a balance of expensive and inexpensive items and limit the use of market price items, which have the greatest fluctuation in prices.

● Logical Section

 

As a part of the restaurant menu design process, it must be kept in mind that the dishes should be divided into logical segments. This means there should be a separate section for appetizers, mains, beverages, and more.

 

● Use Photos Cautiously

 

Photographs of food are normally connected with the menu card of big-restaurants; not for the small roadside eateries. But in case small restaurants do utilize photographs, they should make sure that the photos of their food are of high quality. Only then customers will take interest in going through the menu. However, by and large, too many food photography might not engage the customers. Rather too many photos in a menu might distract them. For this reason, photos should be used sparingly.

● Menu Descriptions

 

A menu description ought to be clear and captivating enough to make a diner’s mouth water. Continuously clarify what the significant ingredients are being used in a specific dish, and utilize ethnic names to make them look very  unique. By and large, a decent guideline that needs to be followed is to keep the description short and crisp..

 

● Make Use of Boxes

 

While logical sections are important for the menu designing process; at the same time, it’s important to use boxes to group the dishes. For example, if you are making a section for beverages, then group it into two by making one box for cocktails and another box for mocktail. Similarly, for the main course, Italian restaurants can make use of boxes for grouping Pasta, Antipasti, etc. This would make it easy for the customers to order dishes according to their requirements.

● Typography

 

While the look of a custom menu printing can be easily determined; the same can be done for the typography that needs to be used for designing the menu. Successful typography will convey the image of a restaurant and result in a more readable menu. Determination of typeface might rely upon various useful elements, for example, the measure of text expected to serenely fit on the page. Utilizing more than one typeface – say, to recognize the names and depictions of menu things – may assist with directing clients through the menu. 

 

● Color Usage

 

The color plays an important role for a restaurant website or for a restaurant menu. The color shading can help to determine whether it would be able to keep the attention of target customers hooked to the site or the menu for a longer time or not.

 

So it’s important to select tones dependent on your ideal target group and the theme of the restaurant. Various tones have distinctive mental consequences for a watcher, so your shading plan will assist with setting the temperament of an eatery just as causes to notice specific food things.

 

Multiple Menu

 

Do you offer a digital menu to your customers? Or do you offer a physical menu to the diners. In case you are going for the second option for your restaurant, make it a point to offer multiple menus. Instead of providing a thick menu card to the customers, make it a point to have multiple menus. For instance, you can have a separate menu for the bar section.  Similarly, a separate menu for the appetizers and another menu card for main course dishes. This would make it easy for the customers to pick a menu card as per their meal preferences.

 

Also, when offering a physical menu to the diners in your restaurant, it’s not mandatory to offer a tangible paper menu always. Rather, a billboard close to the counter could be offered.  However in this current scenario a digital menu would be the best choice for the customers to order food.

 

The greatest thing to contemplate with regards to menu plan across stages is pictures. While you ought to be cautious with picture determination and use on a printed menu, pictures are a brilliant apparatus for site and versatile menu choices. This is valid basically in light of the fact that a site or application menu is intended to get individuals to visit your foundation. The seriously alluring the pictures, the more probable you are to attract somebody.

 

Many restaurants have already implemented these hacks for their restaurant menu design. This is helping them to cater to a large number of audience at a time with ease.