"Success has no menu,
you get served what you plan for."
Jos Saldana​
Know your goals
Creating a menu is about blending practicality, branding, and customer expectations. Your menu should be thoughtful and intentional, whether it’s the design or the food items. The menu sets the character and feel of your restaurant. A customer should be able to tell what they can expect from your restaurant simply by looking at and reading your menu.
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What’s the first impression you want people to have of your? What demographics are you trying to attract? What is the general vibe and style of your restaurant? What kind of restaurant do you want to be? Knowing the answers to these these questions is critical to creating your menu.
Menu Development
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​When designing and devoping your menu, your menu must reflect the following elements:
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Industry trends. Staying on top of industry trends can guide your strategies and help you better understand customer needs before you dive into the details of your market.
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Local demographics. Gaining a stronger awareness of your market can help you identify the pricing and product range that makes sense when you’re creating a menu.
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Competitive dynamics. Researching the competition will help you refine your ideas and get a clearer picture of what you need to do to stand out in the marketplace.
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Food availability. Understanding what’s grown in your area will open opportunities to source local goods in an affordable, sustainable way that creates value for your restaurant.
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Team skills. The skills of your chef, line cooks, and other culinary team members will have a huge influence on the kind of menu you can create.
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Thoughtful pricing. Pricing is about finding the right balance between food quality, cost, portion size, and serving experience along with what customers are willing to pay in order to find a sweet spot that creates profitability.
Creating a Thoughtful Menu
Costing
Calculating the food cost for each menu item might not be as fun as designing it, but is absolutely necessary to run a profitable operation. One of the biggest problems in the restaurant industry is that roughly 80% of restaurants don’t cost out their menu, and another 5% cost their menus incorrectly. How can this be? Costing a menu is time consuming. It consists of breaking down every item on your menu to its individual ingredients and determining exactly how much it costs to create each of those items.
Categorization
Once you know how much profit is driven by each menu item, you can then plot your menu items by popularity and profitability together in a menu engineering matrix. The process of categorizing each of your menu items will allow you to determine how to apply your menu-engineering efforts.
Analysis
Menu engineering requires analyzing the items on your menu to figure out which ones are the most popular and profitable. This is vitally important, because you will be designing your menu around this information.
Design
When designing your menu, you should use the findings from your menu engineering analysis to guide the layout. This process, can’t be accomplished with a simple checklist. Your menu should express your restaurant’s personality, focus on your overall business goals, promote your profitability and entice your customers.
Psychology
Visual perception is inextricably linked to how customers read a menu. The psychology behind menu design covers aspects such as positioning, color theory, use of buzz words, controlled costing and more. How do you decide how and when you should apply each menu psychology technique? Guests will only scan your menu for an average of 109 seconds, thats the time gap you have to set your menu’s tone for both customer satisfaction and optimal profit.
Communication
Finally, don’t forget to train your staff on your menu design. Your front-of-house team is likely to be asked about the menu by customers, so they need to fully understand it themselves. They are your brand ambassadors, take advantage!