Your restaurant’s menu is one of the most important tools for making sales and having hungry customers leave full and satisfied. Of course, this should never come at the expense of the quality of your food or the skills of your kitchen and service staff, but the menu remains crucial for conveying your brand as well as your tasty meals and refreshing beverages.
What are the best ways to impress your patrons with your menu? Here are a few tips:
A picture says a thousand words, so having photos of real menu items on your menu is a sure way to impress customers and to help them decide on what to eat. Whereas stock images may work well for some businesses, restaurants should always be using real, genuine photos carefully taken of their menu items to represent exactly what customers can expect.
This means that you should be selecting high-resolution photos of your signature staples and your high profit dishes, both to generate more revenue but also to inspire the appetite of your customers.
Your menu is also the first place where you should be advertising recurring specials and promotions. It’s often best to complement these with sandwich boards or chalkboards at the entrance or outside to attract customers, but you should also make it crystal clear in your menu which items are available for lunch or dinner specials, for example.
Many restaurants with one-off or seasonal specials may instead wish to opt for printed inserts accompanying the menu. This is common in Europe where the menu of the day is often inserted on the first page, which can entice customers to try your restaurant specials without having to redo the menu altogether.
A clean, well-designed, and easy-to-read menu should clearly demonstrate to customers all of your offerings in an organised manner. Appetisers, entrees, desserts, wines and non-alcoholic beverages, for example, should all be clearly delineated and grouped together.
Not only does this improve the customer experience, but it can also help you lay out an efficient system for your restaurant’s inventory so that chefs can make accurate orders according to various dishes and ingredients.
Most likely anyone working in or for the restaurant industry knows that profit margins tend to be quite slim, but profits are not always uniformly small on all items. Alcoholic beverages and certain desserts, for example, might yield far higher profits and could make a great opportunity for upsales.
Menus can be a great way to entice upsales whilst simultaneously improving the customer experience. Try offering a 2 beer + 2 burger combo, for example, or accompanying higher-profit menu items with standard fare as a sort of combo at a reasonable price.
It used to be that just about every sit-down restaurant depended on printed menus, but the pandemic years have brought about innovative ideas like QR code menus and online ordering (even within a sit-down restaurant). Printed menus are still essential, however, but don’t shy away from adding these new technologies in tandem with your menu.
Consider adding QR codes to your menu, for example, that can link to online reviews and encourage good reviews with commensurately good service.
Print your restaurant menus with us at Print on Demand.
