A good restaurant relies on great food, a cosy atmosphere and ambience, friendly waitstaff and diligent line cooks and chefs, and stellar reviews from satisfied patrons. One important ingredient in every restaurant’s recipe to success is a beautiful and appealing menu to whet the appetite of customers and to provide clear and concise information about what to expect.
There’s usually a lot going on backstage to create a new menu, such as consulting with chefs and evaluating profit margins, for example, but designing and printing the menu once that’s all said and done is just as important as the planning that goes on behind the scenes.
Below are five quick tips for designing appealing restaurant menus:
Your restaurant menu should always use high-resolution, genuine photos of your food and your establishment rather than stock images. Customers are well aware of what fast food burgers actually look like vs how they’re portrayed on adverts and on menus, so take the high road and make sure that your menu items are real and appetising so that customers won’t be disappointed.
Take some time to consult with your chef and prepare all menu items for the sake of photographing them and use the opportunity afterwards for restaurant staff to try menu items themselves so that they can better recommend dishes to customers.
Colour, font, and other design elements are important for any printed materials but perhaps even more so for restaurant menus. Colours play a psychological role in emotions, including hunger, which is why a certain double-arched fast food restaurant (and many other competitors) make frequent use of yellows and reds as they evoke hunger.
Most importantly, choose colours and fonts that are on-brand and that match the overall aesthetic of your restaurant. Fancy cursive fonts can look brilliant for upscale gourmet restaurants, whereas big and bold fonts and colours can easily convey all relevant information to patrons in a family restaurant, for example.
The way your menu is laid out is important not only for organising different categories of food, such as appetisers, wine/beer, entrees, desserts, and so on, but it’s also critical for promoting your most popular dishes or, perhaps better, your high profit margin offerings.
You may also wish to consider adding a printed page inserted into the menu daily with special offers such as the soup of the day and combo offers.
Some folks are quite keen on typos or errors in your menu, so avoid any confusion that your customers may have by double and triple-checking your menu before having it printed a few dozen times.
Pass around a sample menu to your chef and to waitstaff to give it a gander. A fresh set of eyes might help identify any errors in prices, formatting, spelling, and so on.
A menu might be subject to quite a bit of use and possibly abuse, perhaps being touched by thousands of hands and having to be cleaned on occasion. Naturally, you should choose high-quality printed materials for your menu, such as laminated paper to withstand cleaning agents and to make the menu durable.
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