How to Make a Restaurant Menu to Win Your Guests?

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Whenever I go to a restaurant, one thing that disappoints me is the “vaguely designed menu”. It makes ordering so much more difficult.

In spite of the highlighted fancy names, mysterious ingredients, and expensive prices, when I finally order, it just makes me wonder things like:

“What is going to come on the plate?”

“Will that be worth it?”

“What if I ordered non-veg by mistake? The name sounded so…”

All these questions freak me out. I somehow control my urge to ask why can’t they make ordering a simple task. Why this sales tactic is more frustrating than appealing?

So here I am giving justice to all these thoughts I have about restaurant menus.

In this blog, you will find an easy and effective guide on how to make a restaurant menu. You will learn what on the menu can repel your customers and what gets them in your confidence.

Menu: The Foundation of A Restaurant

When a customer comes into your restaurant, the first thing they ask for is – “the menu”.

It is like an identity card of your restaurant. Hence, it should be authentic and appealing.

Your restaurant’s ambiance and infrastructure can just lure the guests in but your menu is what makes them stay and order.

Let’s understand it with a scenario that how a menu works for your guests.

Samay had gone to a newly built restaurant near his locality. But the menu was not promising enough so he left. Then, at his friend’s birthday bash, he was invited to the same place. He had to order something this time. To his surprise, the food was exceptionally delicious. Earlier, he’d judged it only by the menu.

And this is normal in the restaurant industry. The taste of your food is important but a customer looks at the hygiene, services, and menu before actually ordering.

This is why your menu is the guest keeper.

And if something is keeping your guests, then you must have it built with proper insights. Failing to do so, can affect your restaurant’s performance and its true potential.

What is An Effective Menu?

An effective menu satisfies your guests but at the same time leaves them craving for more.

Having it by your side, you see a significant increase in your sales and a positive change in your customers’ ordering behavior.

If you want to check whether you have a menu like this, see if you can relate to these patterns:

• New guests stay and visit again.
• They remember your menu items (specifically by name).
• Guests from the same table order twice.
• While ordering, they need minimal assistance.
• They explore more of your menu items each time they visit.
• Guests do not just hang out at your restaurant. They make a proper order.

To build this scenario at your restaurant, your menu must possess certain qualities. It should be in line with how the psyche of customers works while ordering. 

In the next section, I will discuss the details of the same.

Recipe to Make an Ideal Menu for Restaurants

A restaurant’s menu-making needs absolute care and attention. It is a recipe and if anything goes wrong, it won’t get the required appreciation.

Hence, from here, I am going to walk you through the question of the hour – “how to create a menu for a restaurant?”

1. List them all

The prime thing is to make a list of everything from food to beverages to specials and so on. 

While making this list, you can add new items to your restaurant that are getting popular among your target audience. You can leave out the items that are not working well for your restaurant.

With all the additions and eliminations, update the list of every item you want on your menu.

Note: Do not overdo your listing just to attract as many customers to your table.

Putting out way too many options will make your menu look clumsy and the clarity will leave the chat. Besides, looking at a menu that is flooded with items makes the customers doubt your food quality.

2. Categorize wisely

After making the list, put the items under categories. The major categories are – “food and beverages”. (You can keep a separate menu for both to bring more clarity)

Then comes a further division in the food and beverages sections. If your outlet provides cuisines from different countries then the categories will be like, Italian, Chinese, Indian, and so on. 

If you are specific to let’s say, Indian, then you may put South Indian, North Indian, or maybe just bread, curries, etc. Making categories help your guests customize their meals from the respective section.

Moreover, these categories make it intriguing to explore more items. If everything is listed together then your customer would naturally order fewer items.

3. Pick perfect names

Restaurateurs often overdo the naming of their menu items. They don’t realize that a perfect name for their dishes need not be fancy all the time. 

A perfect name is easy to catch. Heard about word of mouth?

How will your customers convey that your restaurant has a must-try dish if they couldn’t remember its name? This is the time to resolve it.

The name should be creative, catchy, and simple so that your customer would not even ask for the menu next time. He’d have it all memorized.

4. Add spicy descriptions

To add authenticity, you must give each menu item a proper description.

Description means writing down the core ingredients you are using to make that dish or how it is made so that customers can imagine its taste. Keep it short and crispy.

But why keep it at all? Why give away so much space for this? It has a reason:

Firstly, reading the details of a dish eliminates the room for any doubt. It saves your staff from all the questions about the ingredients used.

Besides this, people are now conscious of what they are consuming. They prefer particular things and avoid others. With the description, they can choose or ask to customize the ingredients beforehand.

This builds their trust in your recipe.

5. Flaunt your specials

To stand out in the industry, your menu should have a USP (unique selling point).

This is where the “specials” section comes into the picture. It is the USP for any menu.

So if you haven’t had any specials in your outlet, then you must ponder upon that. After all, it helps you set up a unique image in the market.

Your menu’s USP can include a set of recipes that belongs to your restaurant exclusively. If not an all-new recipe, you can also think of a combo of dishes or highlight offers to fulfill its purpose. 

6. Put up precise prices

A wrong pricing strategy can ruin your whole business.

Pricing differs for each restaurant depending on various factors like its location, recognition, ambiance, and many such things. 

It is necessary to look out at the market and rate your restaurant wisely without any bias. 

A price is a number and your guest must get pleased by it. So put up the figures that a person would not question. 

For instance, putting a straight ₹300 can seem “costly” to your customer but putting ₹299 doesn’t. Likewise, studying the different patterns of how your customer looks at the price is important. This is the key to putting up the prices if you want an effective increment in your sales.

7. Place the items effectively

How you place the restaurant menu items also has a lot to do with the psyche.

When we look at a paper, certain places on it get more or instant attention. It is called the Z-line.

According to this, a customer’s eyes move like figure Z, i.e. from the upper right to the lower left corner when they look at the menu. This is why the items that make the highest profit are placed at the top and the bottom.

This also creates a void for the items placed in the middle. To overcome that, restaurants can highlight the items in combo or offers with the outlined box in the middle.

8. Sprinkle mouth-watering pictures

Only texts can’t make your guests enough excited about the menu. Pictures are important to water their mouths and build up their cravings.

Therefore, the items that look presentable and more eye-pleasing should be captured and showcased well on the menu.

You can take picture of one item from each category and that would be enough to make your menu vibrant.

Also, the picture placement and its colors should complement the text.

9. Choose an appealing design

While designing a perfect menu, two things should be kept in mind. The first is to make it pleasing to the eyes with a light and soothing texture.

The second and most important thing is to align it with the theme of your restaurant. (The theme refers to the name and the ambiance of your restaurant and you should complement your menu design with them.)

10. Print it out

The last step after your menu is prepared is to serve it nicely i.e. to print it out. 

Do not make printing a vague process. A menu booklet should be presentable in itself.

While printing it, choose thick paper so that it’ll suffice for a long time. The texture of the paper can vary as per your choice as long as it is smooth and pleasant.

You should also consider making your menu waterproof so that it lasts long. After all, the menu will be around the water no matter how protectively you are keeping it.

Get a Digital Menu Too!

This is the world of digitalization. We are just living in it. 

I hope you agree with this.

Digital menu gets more love from your customer because ordering over the screen has become more comfortable nowadays.

If this is the case, then you would understand that having a digital menu is extremely important. But there’s no extra hustle. When your menu is ready, you can update it the same way on the digital setup.

Yes, there will be changes in the design and strategies to make it effective on a screen. But the basic idea remains the same.