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A well-designed, engaging menu is a key component of your restaurant’s brand and plays a vital role in a customer’s first impression of your business. Your menu offers a window into what customers can expect when they order from you online or come in to dine. Whether they check your menu online before visiting, peruse it outside your venue as they’re passing, or first lay eyes on it when they sit down, your menu is often the first – and sometimes the only – chance you have to impress potential customers.
But effective menu design goes beyond listing what you sell. From layout to typography, photography to item variations, there are many restaurant menu ideas you could consider that will help contribute to your restaurant’s success.
Below, we’ll explore key considerations of graphic design, menu engineering and descriptive language to arm you with all you need to build or overhaul your menu.
1. Harness best-practice design principles to help sell your menu
An effectively designed menu is more than a static list of what you’re selling. With photography, layout and typography, you can cleverly guide your customers’ eyes to your most delicious (and profitable) items.
Leading the eye: Make your menu more readable and more profitable
Consider how you’ll guide your menu readers’ eyes around your menu – this might be to help them easily navigate courses and sides, or it might be to lead them to your house specialities or popular and high-profit menu items. There are a number of somewhat contradictory views out there on eye-scanning patterns; the main thing is to be aware of the concept and use strong design elements to lead the customer’s eyes where you want them to go.
Just so you’re across the concepts, different research in the past has suggested the sweet spot on any restaurant menu is the upper right-hand corner, where it’s long been believed customers’ eyes land first. But other research suggests customers read from left to right, while yet others say the eye first lands in the middle of the menu, moves to the right corner and then the left, in a pattern known as the ‘golden triangle’.
As we’ve already suggested, with multiple ideas about where the eye lands first, a better strategy is to learn the art of leading the eye with effective design principles, strong graphic elements and an appropriate layout. We’ll talk about these next, under our headings on typography and on colour, photos, illustrations and other graphic elements.
Your menu might be read in several formats and on different devices. The mobile and laptop view of your menu might be slightly different to the version you lay on your tables and place in your window. Regardless, there are key considerations to keep in mind to ensure your brand is appropriately reflected in your menu and your customers are presented with all the information they need.
Choose typography that reinforces your restaurant concept and brand
Different typefaces have different personalities, so it’s important to choose one that suits your restaurant concept and brand. First, you should think about headings – choose sizes and styles that suit your brand tone, and consider how headings can be used to push the eye around the page. You should also think about different capitalisation styles in the various sections of your menu. For example, will you use ALL CAPS for the names of menu items or just for course headings? The aim is to help customers quickly identify relevant sections. Marta in Sydney uses uppercase for the name of each item and lowercase for the descriptions, while Melbourne’s Made in Casa subverts this, using lowercase for the item name and uppercase for the descriptions and section headings.
To avoid drawing attention to the cost of products – you’ll want your customers to be thinking about your delicious menu and great dining experience instead – you may choose to omit the dollar sign when writing the price of each item. Similarly, you might avoid using large or bolded typefaces when listing prices.
Whether you’re fun or fine dining, serious or sassy, make sure the typography you choose – including the colour – is consistent across your menus, website and all other brand assets, such as the email marketing campaigns you can send through Square Marketing.
Think about colour, photos or illustrations, and other graphic elements
Like typography, colours and graphic elements such as photos and illustrations help differentiate your brand. Photographs are a powerful selling tool – especially for digital menus – but there is a view that they should be used sparingly when it comes to printed menu designs. Having too many photos can be associated with lower-priced offerings. Instead, consider using a limited selection that suggests just how enticing your menu is. A few more considerations: make sure images are large enough for diners to ‘consume’, well-shot and appetising, and be sure your kitchen can recreate each dish consistently with what’s being advertised in the image.
For an example of photography used exceptionally well at the higher end of the dining spectrum, we can look at Melbourne fine-dining restaurant France Soir. It uses one large professional photo for each of its menu categories, which helps promote its focus on French cuisine and reinforces its reputation as an elegant restaurant.
Alternatively, illustrations might be better suited to your brand and can give you greater flexibility than photographs to reinforce your restaurant concept. Montalto uses hand-drawn illustrations and handwritten notes in its sample menu, aligning with its holistic farm-to-table experience and homegrown produce, while Park Pantry uses simple drawings on its menu, website and shop front as part of its branding.
Or your use of graphic elements could be even simpler than photography and illustrations. Shapes like boxes or ovals can be used to frame popular or high-profit items to draw attention to them. You might label these as a ‘house specialty’, ‘customer favourite’ or ‘chef’s special’ to give them extra selling power.
2. Decide how you will categorise your menu items
How you organise your menu items will largely depend on your restaurant concept. Bistros and fine-dining restaurants commonly lay out their menus by course (entrées/starters, mains and desserts), but your layout might also be influenced by your cuisine. Bocados Spanish Kitchen in Newcastle, for example, categorises its items by pintxos (aperitives), tapas y raciones (dishes to share) and larger banquets.
You might also base your categories and menu layout on food type or cooking technique. For example, a steakhouse might have a full menu with a separate section that is ‘From the Grill’; an Italian restaurant will likely categorise pasta dishes and pizzas into easily readable groups. Food-based categories could be organised by protein types like beef, pork, chicken, fish and plant-based, alongside sides and salads. Or you could follow a dietary-based approach of meat, vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free. These different types of categories can complement each other and you may opt for a mixture of several approaches.
3. Highlight high-profit menu items
Working in tandem with the eye-guiding techniques and graphic design elements we’ve talked about so far, you should also consider how to highlight your most profitable or popular items. This process is known as menu engineering, and the first step is knowing which menu items are your most profitable by comparing an item’s costs with its popularity. Square for Restaurants includes a Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) report to make this step easier. You’ll then be able to build a matrix showing which items are:
- High-profit and high-selling (these winners should be highlighted on your menu)
- Low-profit but high-selling (sheer volume can make these consistent revenue items)
- High-profit but low-selling (factors such as menu placement might boost these sales)
- Low-profit and low-selling (eliminate these!)
Considering techniques such as item placement and the inclusion of graphic elements will help you highlight your high-profit, high-selling menu items. Consider using a test-and-learn approach with your menu design to see what works. While printing will always come with costs, Square for Restaurants makes it easy to test different on-screen menus and redesign the layout if you’re not seeing the results you want. You can then apply these learnings to your next print menu.
4. Highlight profitable item variations and add-ons
Slice of cheese with your burger? Side of halloumi with your breakfast? Highlighting variations and add-ons can be a great way of boosting profits and leaving your customers satisfied. These extras are often found in a separate breakout box on restaurant menus, like the one from Frankie Says. But where add-ons apply to specific items, you could also list them under each one, like they do at Chapter E. Variations and add-ons can be managed simply and efficiently with Square for Restaurants, which makes it easy for your front-of-house and kitchen staff to add and keep track of variations.
5. Serve up mouth-watering food descriptions
When it comes to designing the perfect menu, don’t underestimate the power of well-crafted food descriptions. If your menu is the first contact customers have with your restaurant, then it’s the descriptions that set the tone for their dining experience. A clear, descriptive menu helps customers make decisions more easily, which improves the efficiency of your restaurant and prevents customers from feeling frustrated. These descriptions are your opportunity to differentiate your restaurant from your competitors across the street.
Each menu item should include the item name, ingredients and descriptive selling copy. As a rule of thumb, your item names should tell the customer almost everything they need to know, with any extra information listed in the description.
In reading the item name ‘steak tartare’, your customer has most of the information they need, so long as they know that in this context, tartare means raw ground beef. You should probably include that information in the ingredients description. From there, perhaps you can add some more evocative language in the selling copy. Your beef tartare might include fresh herbs and a cured yolk, for example. You can also add geographical origins or respected brand names to make ingredients more appealing and to highlight if they are locally sourced. For example, your steak tartare might be grass-fed eye fillet from Cape Grim, Tasmania.
You might like to experiment with the order and how you use selling copy, and add descriptive words like ‘traditional’, ‘warm’ or ‘slow-cooked’ to your menu names or list of ingredients. You could also describe the taste of unfamiliar ingredients, for example, ‘lean and tender bresaola cured beef’.
Is there a backstory you can tell about your menu items? Perhaps your vegetables are grown on-site? Notice how Butcher and the Farmer lists ingredients such as “Persian feta” and “Spanish onion”. It also lists its “signature hot wings sauce” and “tender spatchcock”, which tells the customer a more complete story about what they can expect.
Incorporating enticing descriptions means customers are more likely to want to return to sample the items they couldn’t order the first time. Why not entice them back to try the rest of your menu through a loyalty program? Square Loyalty makes that process simple.
Once you’re happy with your descriptions, it’s important you use a proofreader to check your menu, as any typos will undermine your customers’ confidence in your service and quality.
6. Bonus tip: Is dynamic menu pricing right for your restaurant?
Though it’s more often associated with the travel industry or rideshare apps, dynamic pricing can have a big impact on the restaurant industry, too. Happy hours, lunch specials and adjusted off-peak online ordering prices are all examples of dynamic pricing.
With Square Point of Sale, you can easily change menu prices, while Square for Restaurants allows you to create and customise your menus online and through the Square for Restaurants POS app.
Square for Restaurants dynamic menus are designed to correspond to your physical menus. You can customise multiple menus for different types of service, and all you may need to do is print physical menus for each of the pricing scenarios you plan to offer, such as brunch, lunch and dinner.
