How to Design Your Restaurant Menu in 2024? – Tips & Menu Ideas

Quick Summary: Running a successful restaurant requires you to carefully design customer-facing stuff, such as reception, sitting areas, counters, entry points, websites, apps and even restaurant menus. As the restaurant menu is the crucial one that drives sales, we have explored some of the tips and suggested restaurant menu design ideas to implement while working on your restaurant menu part. Let’s explore.

Are you running a restaurant and exploring ways to improve customer experience? You can do plenty of things to provide a better customer experience, but the food menu can be the first thing to enhance as it acts as your salesperson. If you explore restaurants online or even if you visit any sit-in restaurant, you will find that restaurant menus are given much priority. They stress having unique restaurant menu design ideas and presenting customers with a completely unique menu to set a difference.

Apart from this, a menu is an important marketing tool that communicates about you and your restaurant personality with your customers effectively. It’s a main tool that your customers, online or offline, directly interact with and make up their minds about what to order. It drives sales, and you must present them with a well-designed and intuitively crafted restaurant menu.

What should a restaurant menu look like?

Every restaurant will have a unique menu based on their cuisines and dishes. However, there are some essential elements that every appealing menu must include. So, next time when you design your menu, Consider these factors in mind at every stage-

• Concise but appetizing item descriptions
• Menu Categorized in Sections
• Restaurant logo and branding
• Restaurant contact details, including address, phone number, web, and social handles
• Font should match restaurant branding

What Makes a Restaurant Menu Great?

Menus for restaurants are much more than just a list of dishes and cuisines a restaurant offers. It is much more than that. As we said earlier, it is your best sales tool.

Firstly, they sell your products(food) while describing them well to the customers with food descriptions. Secondly, they also help promote your restaurant brand with the design elements. Thus, it is a powerful tool for restaurants to boost their brand visibility and sales. Thus, it is important to design your menu well.

Your restaurant menu can act as your silent salesperson if strategically planned. A good menu is designed specifically to match the taste buds and budgets of different groups of guests. The menu should offer dishes for guests who can afford to spend more and those with less capacity. Thus, menus can boost sales and bring more visitors if used as a marketing tool.

Consider these factors while planning your restaurant menus design.

How to Design Restaurant Menu: Top 15 Factors to Keep in Mind

A restaurant menu design is crucial, and you need to have various factors in mind when you design the menu. If you are creating a digital menu, you will have various options. For example;

• If you have implemented a restaurant management system, you will get a pre-designed restaurant menu that can be added, edited, deleted and updated according to your menu. You will have a customization option as well.
• You can get templates for restaurant menu design, which you can use for both online and offline purposes.
• Third, you can choose a custom restaurant menu design, in which you can put everything that a restraint menu design should have. We have suggested some of the best tips that you can explore and implement if you find them helpful.

1 . Highlight the Most Profitable Dishes

Firstly, the menu design should be neat and clean. Guests must be able to read the food items clearly and navigate easily.

Secondly, you can design the menus for restaurants in a way that helps you sell your most profitable dishes more. According to a design rule called the golden triangle, people look at a page in a triangle pattern. Their eyes start in the centre, then move to the top right and top left.

If you keep the items you want to sell more at the centre or top of your menu, your guests will see them quickly.

2 . Menu Design should Match restaurant branding

The menu design should match your restaurant’s branding. You should use the same colour and typography for the menu you use on your restaurant website, mobile app, or social media.

If the branding is consistent, the visitors, regular customers, or first-time guests will immediately recognize the restaurant branding. For example, the branding should be consistent for a website, restaurant menu, flyer, or road sign.

3 . Photos -good or bad

High-quality food images have been a great tool that restaurants use to promote their food dishes. However, using food images in different menu styles and restaurants is tricky.

According to some studies, customers connect food photos on a physical menu with cheap food. Also, too many photos actually turn customers down. Conversely, food photos on digital menus boost online orders very much.

So, restaurant owners should be very mindful while using food images while designing different menus. In some cases, food images significantly help boost sales and customer attention. In other cases, avoiding adding images completely or adding just a few is good.

4 . Runners in your restaurant menu

Have you clearly mentioned the runners in your restaurant menu?

“Runners” are the most popular and best-selling dishes of your restaurant. Successful restaurants always have a “star” dish on their food menu. These dishes are the runners that bring the most cash to the register.

Now the question comes: creating a star dish from the menu. Also, customers should clearly know it. Restaurants have to make it distinctive.

A dish that has a unique taste and flavor, and it is the only one in the town; you have met your goal. Restaurants can raise the price for the star dish and earn maximum revenue.

5 . Menu contents

Should I offer a wide variety of dishes on the menu?

Many restaurants try to fit as many dishes into the menu as possible, thinking of attracting higher sales.

However, this is only true in some cases. Customers get confused to see a wide variety of options on the menu.

Offering a limited number of dishes can indicate quality rather than a mistake. Having a neat and clear menu helps position your restaurant better in the industry. In addition, if you have limited options to offer, you can maintain that unique taste consistently.

6 . Special Menus

Many people worldwide are vegans, vegetarians, non-vegetarians, and diabetics. Also, some people are allergic to certain foods. It becomes difficult for such people to find anything to order in restaurants.

If you offer a special menu along with the menu for a group of guests, it can boost your sales much more. Customers like these special efforts made to keep them happy and satisfied, and thus, they tend to return or place orders more often. For instance, you can keep a special menu for kids or a happy hour menu to delight the guests in your restaurant.

7 . Analysis of the menu

So far, you must have understood that your restaurant menu can offer much more than just displaying food dishes. It is the most affordable way to attract higher traffic to your restaurant and boost sales as well.

So, how can you maintain consistency while designing the menu successfully? It is possible with regular analysis and consistent changes in the menu.

Restaurants that regularly update their menus have experienced higher sales. To optimize the menu, restaurateurs should base their decisions on data gathered through effective analysis.

They can check their restaurant’s historical sales data and menu to see the dishes that made the maximum sales. Thus, you can add those dishes more and also increase their prices for higher revenue.

In addition, restaurants can talk to their employees and ask for their suggestions. Since employees interact with customers to answer their queries, they can suggest practical improvements to the menu.

8 . Stories that Sell

People like stories, then why not use them to sell more food. Every cuisine has its story of origin that tells where, how, and who invented that cuisine. Customers like to know these stories and learn about the food tradition. So, restaurateurs can add small descriptions about the background to attract more orders.

9 . Write Out all Menu Name

Before you design your restaurant menu, write all food items on a piece of paper or using Excel or Google Sheets. You need to mention everything that you want to visualize to your users. For example, the number of menu teams, ingredients used in it, how it will taste like, if there’s any allergy complication, and who should avoid it or have it.

10 . Categorize Menu Items

Now, divide those menu items into categories, such as veg, non-veg, and others. If you are using a food delivery system or app, categorizing menu items is easy. You can also do it when you Create a custom restaurant menu design. Apart from veg and non-veg, you can also categorize your restaurant menu as high profit, high popularity, et cetera.

11 . Menu Color Scheme on Card

While designing a restaurant menu, you need to be careful about the menu color scheme. For example, you need to choose the color that perfectly represents the menu and its items. Apart from this, you also need to ensure that the menu design and its color perfectly align with your business brandings, such as color, theme, and others.

12 . Design Your Restaurant Menu

Once you are done with collecting the list of restaurant menus, categorizing them and even deciding the color schemes, it’s time to design the restaurant menu. Select the right provider or choose the online restaurant website builder that offers a customized restaurant menu option. You can also opt for designing a restaurant menu from scratch, albeit it is advisable when you are building your online restaurant website from scratch. Apart from that, you may hire experts from an ad agency to help you design the right menu or hire an individual graphic designer and get one designed.

13 . A menu has to be easy to digest

Sometimes, we find restaurant menus informative, which draws the attention of users from the real menu items, and users may get overwhelmed. Hence, keeping your restaurant menu to point and easy to read, learn and understand can be good practice.

14 . Sell food, not price.

You are selling food, not price. Hence, the entire focus should be on how delicious the food is, not the cost. Ensure food prices on the menu are not given much priority. For example, remove the price sign, such as ($) dollar, (£) pound, and if you are using a number, ensure to use a lighter and shorter font than the menu name.

15 . Clearly mention ingredients used in food.

Customers prefer to know about the food they order. Not mentioning ingredients for food may give a bad experience to users. Hence, clearly mention every ingredient, possible allergy complication and other information on your menu. It will help tour customers make better food choices.

Conclusion

So, by far you must have got enough ideas on how to create a restaurant menu for maximum benefits.

Design your restaurant menu well while implementing these suggestions to see the influx of orders to your restaurants. The effectiveness of digital and in-person menus is equally important.

If you are setting up your online restaurant business, you can try our SaaS based online ordering system. The ordering software enables restaurants to create and customize the digital menu.