How to Design Your Menu

Your menu is your primary means of representation: It says exactly who you are and what you hope to convey personality-wise. It also should create enough of an impression so that it stays with your client long after the waiter or waitress walks off with it. In addition, it must convey your restaurant’s brand in a manner that makes diners excited to be there, want to come back and recommend it to family and friends.

As with most creative endeavors, proper results can’t be achieved without sufficient research. In the case of designing the right menu, that means collecting data from various sources. Examine your own numbers first, such as your restaurant’s prospective financial and marketing numbers and its sales mix. Then look at your competitors: Examine their Web sites, menus and marketing efforts and try to see where they went right and how you could compete successfully with those traits. Also, look at vendors and see how they handle similar challenges, and read industry sources (trade publications, published research) to evaluate trends and successes.

After that, consider your location and how it relates to the immediate neighborhood around you. Eighty percent of a typical restaurant’s business usually comes from the residents living within a 10-minute drive of that location. Knowing this, ask yourself the following:

• What can my restaurant menu offer that others in the area do not?
  
• What menu items do we have in common?
  
• How does our pricing match up?
  
• Does my menu offer more variety than theirs?

Determining these factors will help guide you towards designing the right menu for your restaurant.

Design your restaurant menu in a way that mimics the dining experience. Arrange items sequentially, with appetizers, salads and soups first, then entrees, then desserts. Place star items on pages that contain more visual flair than others, and set markers or photographs around featured items to further draw attention.

Merchandizing techniques will further help this agenda and create a menu by allowing you to easily spotlight specialty and signature items, introduce newer selections and invoke an appropriate sense of personality. In turn, the techniques also make these items easier for your clients to find and recognize.

Tips for Menu Design and Preference of Item Position

• Place your best selling items, or those you want to have the biggest draw, on the Prime Sweet Spots of the menu. These areas refer to the spots where the average client brings his or her eyes to first -- and thus receive one’s first attention. Also, arrange your menu in columns, depending on your restaurant’s image: One column inflects a sense of sophistication and elegance; two columns brings forth a sense of playfulness, etc.

• Highlight spotlight or signature items in a way that draws attention to them: Boxing selections off within your menu works well at this, as does adding colors, photographs, labels and logos.

• Naming items specifically or creatively (ex. Rojo Chicken Salad), and using active descriptions of the ingredients in the dishes, makes the food sound more enticing and exotic for the client -- and may induce future visits.

In the end,

Comparing your menu with that of your competitors also helps. It not only opens more doors towards pricing your menu, it offers you a solid foundation on how to measure your profits. Performing a cross analysis helps uncover strengths and weaknesses in your pricing plan, specifically in terms of the way your items are priced and presented. By doing this, you determine which items are most popular, which are most profitable, which need extra emphasis, and which need to removed or replaced.