6 Steps To Writing an Effective Menu for Your Restaurant
When a customer goes into a restaurant, they expect there to be a menu, so they can easily see what’s available and for what price. However, as a restaurant owner, you should already be aware that there’s a lot more work that goes into this than meets the eye.
By creating and writing a compelling and engaging menu, you can maximize your sales opportunities as well as bringing in new customers. Here’s how.
1. Decide on Your Menu
The first thing you can do before you even start writing your menu is deciding what’s going to be on there. Of course, the options are quite possibly limitless and choosing what items you’re going to sell is going to make or break your business. No pressure.
However, when making these decisions, try to keep things balanced, so there’s an option available to everyone. Of course, you’ll also want to consider your budget and the times in which you can prepare the food, especially during lunch rushes.
2. Pricing Your Menu
The next thing you’ll want to do is to decide the price of each item on your menu. Once again, budget and time is a huge factor in this, and you’ll also need to consider how much the ingredients cost to make a dish.
As a rule of thumb, most restaurants use a 30-35% increase in food costs, meaning if you spent $1 on ingredients, you’d charge $3.35. This can seem expensive but bear in mind you have staff costs and bills on your building, such as electric and gas.
3. Design Matters
The final point you’ll want to consider before you start writing is choosing what your menu is going to look like with a design that matches your colors and concept. Choose a beautiful, readable font, with the right size and a good background design that will make each item stand out clearly.
4. Writing Your Menu
With all the prep work done, it’s time to start writing your menu. Start by organizing your dishes into sections, such as Starters, Mains, and Desserts, and start listing them out.
“Start with more affordable and basic dishes at the top and work your way down to the more elaborate and expensive meals, so everybody will know where to look for what price range,” says Jennifer Wilson, a writer from Elite Assignment Help.
5. Create Beautiful Descriptions
You’ll be able to generate far more sales in your restaurant if you create a unique and engaging description of each meal, rather than just listing the dishes or just listing the ingredients.
Use eye-catching and mouth-watering and phrases, such as ‘melts in the mouth’ or ‘delectable’ to get your customers excited about what they’re about to eat.
6. Use Tools for Quality
One of the most overlooked aspects of a menu is the quality of the writing and design itself. Fortunately, you can guarantee a high-quality result using tools from the internet. And to make life even easier, here are some menu builders online that you can start using for free:
Canva.com – Create a restaurant menu online for free from Canva.com.
Webstrauntstore.com – Free online restaurant menu maker from WebstaurantStore.
Adobe Express Menu Maker – With a simple design interface, you don’t have to be a designer to create great-looking menus
Design Wizard – Create impressive image designs for your menu in minutes. This is also a great tool to utilize with your restaurant social media campaign.
Extra Tips for Writing a Menu
One of the most important tips to remember is to keep things short and sweet. Of course, you want to entice your readers with the descriptions, but they don’t want to be sat for hours trying to read everything you’ve written.
Likewise, you need to remember to keep checking your menu to see if you can make any improvements based on your customers and learn when the best times to update it is.
