Simple Ideas for Your Restaurant Menu Design

One of the first few things your potential guests will look at before visiting you or ordering from you is your menu. In fact, they don’t even have to be present in your restaurant to do that anymore. They can simply look it up online before finalizing whether they want to eat at your establishment or not. 

Essentially, this is where they get a glimpse of what the food would look and taste like. It’s also a key selling tool for your restaurant. Whether you’ve got a printed menu, an online one, or a menu board above a counter, a well-designed menu can boost your profitability while enhancing the guest experience. 

If you’re still stuck at the basics and don’t know where to begin, Toast has free and customizable restaurant menu templates that are easy to use. Use this as a starting point to create and promote your own menu.

How Many Items Should be There on a Restaurant Menu?

The fewer, the better. This is further verified by George A. Miller, a cognitive psychology expert; most people can only retain seven pieces of information at a time. This means you should avoid overwhelming your guests with too many options. However, you don’t have to just add seven items to your menu. You should categorize them better so people can browse through them easily. You can also create categories of three and seven dishes which make the menu more accessible to your customers.

Ginormous menus don’t mean a lot these days because people prefer limited offerings done right over dozens of sub-par food options. In fact, people are slowly starting to be more inclined towards speciality restaurants. For most restaurants, a massive menu can hurt profitability in the form of unused or spoiled inventory. When you have fewer items, you can also focus on maintaining the quality of the food across the board.

Restaurant Menu Planning for Profitability

Every restaurant and restaurant menu has one goal at the end of the day: profitability. When done correctly, restaurant menus can have a severe impact on your establishment’s profits. After all, this is one of the first steps that define how the experience is going to feel for your customers. If your least profitable item is the most prominent on the menu, your guests will order it time and again, instead of considering other options that are equally delicious but more profitable for your business. 

If your food is your art, your menu is your canvas. An organized menu can help your waitstaff to upsell different food items to your customers. They can also guide the customers through ordering. For example, telling them what drinks pair well with certain food items and what dishes should be ordered in a larger quantity. Browsing through the menu should feel like reading a brand story: enticing, but not too long.

Additionally, you should also follow the same brand guidelines for your menu as your website, social media, signage, etc. Everything should feel a part of the same overarching idea.

How to Create a Restaurant Menu

A restaurant menu is a printed or digital copy of a list of the items your restaurant serves. It gives a quick understanding of your offerings to your customers when it comes to the cuisine, pricing, and pictures. Every restaurant’s menu will be unique to its key theme or brand persona. But if you’re just starting off, you can cover basic features so the menu is easy to browse through for your customers.

Whether you’re planning to hire experts for this or DIY-ing it, this guide consists of everything you need to keep in mind while creating a restaurant menu.

1. List out all the menu items

Before you directly jump into designing your menu, let’s take a couple of steps back. First and foremost, you need to list down all the menu items your restaurant would serve. You’ll need to create this list after discussing it with your chefs, prep team, and partners. For the ease of designing, you should make a digital list of all the menu items on Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. If you’re looking for some help, our menu templates come tried and tested.

2. Categorize all the menu items

It’s important to systemize your menu items into categories so the customers don’t have difficulty in finding what they need to order. You can have appetizers, entrees, desserts, etc. as the overarching categories. Organize it in a way that best promotes the cuisine and helps the customer you’re serving. You may want appetizers to appear first, and you may want a particular appetizer to be at the top of the list because it's a star. It may be high profit or high popularity, according to your menu engineering worksheet. Simply move around your menu items until they're in the exact order you want them to appear on the menu.

3. Set menu pricing

For this section of your menu engineering worksheet, you’ll spend plenty of time looking at competitors, industry rates, and ingredient costs before you decide on the pricing for your food items. These prices aren’t decided arbitrarily, and they warrant a food-cost deep dive. 

Pricing = brand strategy. So the pricing on each item reflects something specific. Lower prices may make you seem “substandard,” whereas higher prices may indicate some sense of luxury. If you're working off of a previous menu, start by adding in your current prices. Then take a step back to analyze how they worked for you. Put yourself in your customers' shoes. Based on the restaurant sales data in your point of sale system, could you afford to tweak this menu item’s price a little bit to make it more appealing?

In case you’re increasing your pricing for better payments to your waitstaff and chefs, you should consider highlighting that increase in price. You could tell the customers that the increase is reinvested in staff training or for a good cause. You could go with something like, “Thanks to this small increase in our prices, we’ve been able to support our kitchen and wait staff better.”

If you're starting from scratch, you’ll need to figure out a balance between enticing prices and profitability. Our menu engineering course can help you learn how to make data-based decisions on how to price your menu. This is based on your inventory prices and food cost percentages. Even established restaurants could benefit from a refresher on how to use data to make these types of decisions.

4. Creating menu descriptions

While you could just give AI a prompt to create product descriptions that sound fancy, you need to focus on something more: convincing your audience. If you’re feeling stuck, you could start off with something that’s generated using AI. You can then tweak it to make it sound more human.

Branding content may seem easy, but these are the levers you could also use to drive communication across the board. You could also hire a copywriter to write these menu descriptions for you. They’ll have to interview your chefs or cooks to understand exactly how the food is prepared and served. The story behind the creation and serving of a specific food item can act as a driving factor that convinces customers to try stuff on your menu. 

Remember to use descriptive adjectives like refreshing, crispy, savoury, tangy, sour, sweet, or crunchy wherever possible to give your customers a sense of the dish. Ensure that you’re not just focusing on your new customers and keeping your old ones satisfied too. It’s also important to preempt certain questions about allergens and flavours the customers might have so you could address them in the menu.

5. Decide on a menu colour scheme

Once you’ve listed all the items on a sheet, it’s time to focus on something more colourful. Think, menu colour schemes. If you already have brand guidelines, you can simply pick up the menu colour from there. However, if you’re starting afresh, you’ll have to figure out whether you want to invest in a colourful menu vs. a black-and-white one. 

Of course, having consistent colours will help customers remember your brand better in the long run. But if you’re printing out temporary menus, you need to first get the structure and sizes right. You could also print out limited menus with your desired colour scheme to test how your customers react to it. Use these colour tools designs swear by:

• Adobe Colour CC - colour wheel tool

• colourDot - colour palette tool

• ColRD - colour inspiration

6. Designing your restaurant menu

This is where you’ll spend the most time. Once you’ve nailed what you’re going to be serving and got confirmation from your partners, it’s time to put it all together. You might have to try a couple of arrangements before you finalize what works best in your menu. First figure out how you’re going to organize your different food categories. Then, focus on what the additional elements like spacing, margins, elements, photos, etc. would look like. If you're hiring a designer, simply giving them your menu item spreadsheet and colour scheme makes their life so much easier.

If you’re going to be designing the menu yourself, you can use softwares like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, Canva, or the Adobe Suite and use their menu templates as a starting point. Keep these best practices in mind as well:

• Your menu should be easily readable and digestible: the more items you add, the more complicated it gets. Start off with a few key dishes so your customers have a basic overview of what you serve. Then, add any additional items that could balance out your menu.

• Remember the golden triangle. Our eyes typically start in the middle of a page, then move to the top right and top left, so consider putting high-margin dishes at the centre and upper right corner of your menu.

• Use dollar signs strategically. A study at Cornell found that diners who ordered from a menu without dollar signs ($) spent significantly more than those who ordered from a traditionally priced menu. You could print out some menus with the dollar signs and some without. This might help you understand what customers choose better.

7. Restaurant menu photos

Printed menus pack in more personality and visual aesthetics because your customers can see how the food looks and read the descriptions easily. The more distracting your menu is, the longer the customers will take to order something or add more items to their bill. Ensure you have enough negative space so the menu looks clean.

If you serve a unique cuisine or food item, you might want to support them with pictures. Additionally, these photos need to be high quality and should be translated when the menu is printed too. You may need to hire a food photographer to take these photos because low-quality photos can be as distracting as too many elements. You’ll have to focus on cracking the plating, setup, and the background of the food to make it look aesthetically pleasing.

The best part about hiring a photographer is that you can use these high-quality pictures on your social media as well. Make sure to also include a link to your digital menu in your social media bios so users can check out your menus before stepping foot in your restaurant.

8. Prepare and verify optimal design guidelines

This part could be super simple if you’ve got a brand designer you’re working with for print projects. You could also outsource the design side of things to them to maintain consistency in your design guidelines. This will free up a lot of your time while you can still share your general idea of how you want the menu to be designed and where the items will be placed. If you’re going the DIY-ing route, you can choose from Toast’s elaborate restaurant menu templates.

Your restaurant menu creation could take anywhere between a day and a week depending on how elaborate it is. You’ll have to go through different iterations, considering margins, spacing, fonts, and overall composition. You can play up different elements as per your brand name to bring more personality to your designs. For example, The Shameful Tiki Room and and/ore have menus unique to their themes. You could do something similar or keep it simple, too. 

Remember to create a menu that’s easy to update if and when needed. If you don't leave space to add or remove menu items over time, especially if your menu changes seasonally, then you may have to start this whole process over again. As many guests, especially the loyal ones that keep coming back, will remember your menu design and where to find their favourite items, you'll want to make sure it's easy to update so you don't have to overhaul your menu design again and again.

9. Select the final menu layout

The last few steps before finalizing the design for your restaurant menu are super crucial, as you can’t do a major overhaul soon. So ensure that your brand guidelines are followed while creating the menu. In fact, get a designer to check them if you’re unsure. 

You could come up with a few design choices to share with your business partners and staff and vote on which you think is best for your restaurant brand. Your stakeholders would want to review the content of the menu, descriptions, and the pictures you’re using. This is where you need to maintain the tone of voice guidelines on which your brand persona is built. Once the design gets approved on all levels, you can select the menu that looks best to both the internal teams and your customers. 

If you think a certain design would perform better on the basis of your restaurant point of sale, feel free to build your case. You could also A/B test your menus by printing them in limited numbers and taking feedback from your customers in exchange for a freebie.

10. Proofread and print your menu

Proofreading is the final step of creating your restaurant menu before it goes in print. You’re one step closer to your customers actually taking a look at what you offer. Ensure that you’re getting your menu proofread by someone who hasn’t been staring at it the entire week. Basically, when someone with a fresh perspective looks at your menu, they would be able to give you more suggestions before you finalize it. The audience may like fun/quirky menus, but they won’t make sense if they aren’t actually supporting more orders.

One misplaced comma or small typo could change your guests' perception of the restaurant. Make this step a part of your regular process so you don’t end up printing menus that won’t work and end up incurring another expense. When you're ready to print, you could simply use Staples printing service to print on quality paper for cheap or use one of these restaurant menu printing services:

• Vistaprint

• PsPrint

• PrintPlace

The cost of printing depends on how many menus you want, but printing approximately 200 8.5" by 11" menus can cost between $150 and $200.

Drafting & Designing an Online Restaurant Menu

Your online menu shouldn’t be too different from your physical one. When you’re creating it online, you have more opportunities to keep accessibility in mind. But the format and the structure of the menu shouldn’t change. In fact, following the same brand guidelines supports creating recall and is an important part of marketing your restaurant online. The descriptions on your menu should remain consistent throughout, too.

Digital menus give you more space to add other details that help in detailing other finer things about the menu item or restaurant. In fact, some online ordering providers let you upload pictures, too. So when guests are ordering online, it gives them a clear picture of what they’re ordering. Since you don’t have the support of waitstaff online, it’s important to give your customers all the necessary details across platforms. 

Start by creating a spreadsheet of menu items and categories on your online ordering platform. Then, you can input your menu items one by one. In case you want to do away with print menus at your restaurant, you can give your customers access to a QR code that leads them to the online menu. 

Once done ordering, their order gets recorded on the POS system. This new way of ordering puts your guests in control of their dining experience, and the menus never get taken away so they can keep the orders coming all night.

Refresh and Build Your Restaurant Menu Engineering Skills

You’ve finally created the perfect menu, double and triple-checked typos, and even created something aesthetically pleasing. Now, it’s time to print it out and put it to actual use. If you’re going to be using an online menu, ensure you’re setting it up correctly using your POS system. But beware, this is just the beginning.

As time passes, you’ll be able to tell how your customers are using your menu. Whether they’re ordering off the menu or are curious to try something else, it’s all a part of customer research. With the help of a POS system, you should also be able to see how frequently a customer uses the online menu. 

This will help in rearranging items for access and putting the bestsellers at the top to get more customer attention. You won’t have to wait too long to catch customer trends and analysis either. It’s perfect for keeping things fresh and the revenue flowing. 

In case you want to learn the trends and customer conversations better, you can use this menu engineering worksheet to analyze how each of your menu items is performing, and it will guide your next menu redesign.

Related Resources

• 44 Unique Restaurant Ideas to Inspire Your Theme or Concept

• How to Design a Restaurant Floor Plan, Layout and Blueprint

• How Restaurant COGS Control Can Help Boost Profits

• 15 Promotion Ideas for Restaurants in Canada

• Essential Restaurant Kitchen Equipment: The Ultimate Checklist

• How to Create Kitchen Opening and Closing Checklists?