Every great restaurant needs a great menu – and we’re not just talking about the choice of dishes and the way the food is cooked and presented, we’re also talking about the way that the choice of dishes are presented themselves.
You’ve got it, we’re talking menu design. Here are a few tips to remember when you re-design the menu for your restaurant business:
1 – Many restaurateurs have been making a fundamental design mistake for years. They believed that their customers would look at the top right hand corner first so put their most tempting, high profit goodies right there. Research now suggests however that many customers read a menu in the same way that they would read a book – starting on the left hand page and reading down before going on to the right hand page.
2 – Make it easy for your customers to find what they want by dividing the menu up into logical sections. You must have your starters, your sides, your mains, your drinks, your desserts etc all clearly marked and in their own space.
3 – Don’t overdo the photographs. Although it can be tempting to put an image of an eye watering steak as the back image of your menu, these days most people associate this sort of thing with junk mail. If you do want to use photographs make sure that they are of the highest quality but many successful businesses actually leave the picturing of the food to the imagination of their clients. Paint a picture with words, that’s probably the best idea.
4 – Illustrations will often work better than photographs. They can help to promote the personality of your restaurant too.
5 – Don’t worry too much about currency signs; it doesn’t always pay to remind customers about how much they’ll be spending on their meal. Research suggests that customers will spend more money if there are no currency signs on the menu – I bet you hadn’t thought of that one.
6 – Boxes are good. Surrounding some of your most delicious (and profitable) dishes with boxes can be a great idea. Boxes are very good
at grabbing the attention of customers and can be used to promote particular dishes.
7 – The font is very important too. It is a great way to communicate the brand of a restaurant but remember one very important detail – it must be easily readable. Don’t be afraid to mix up the typeface a little too, using a different typeface for perhaps the names of the dishes to the ones used in the descriptions. A lot of this will depend upon the space available on the menu.
8 – Colors are extremely important. Choose your colors to coincide with your restaurant theme and appeal to your target audience. Colors do have quite remarkable psychological effects on people so remember that. The color scheme of your menu (and menu holders) will go some way towards setting the mood in the restaurant as well as drawing the attention to particular food items on the menu. A Mexican style restaurant, for example may choose a warm color scheme which is most generally associated with that genre of food.
Follow these few tips when you design your restaurant menus and you won’t go far wrong. There are some fabulous accessories available at YescomUSA which will really help to complement your menu and your restaurant as a whole. Why not take a look and see how you can improve the ambiance and style of your business which in turn will help it to be more profitable.
Recent Comments