The first thing most potential visitors to your restaurant will do, before they even walk in the door, is examine your menu. They’re looking for good food at an affordable price. If you’re to get them to walk through that door, you make the best of this first opportunity to build confidence in the quality of your restaurant.

Menu Descriptions

There are a number of ways a menu can build such confidence in a potential customer. Clearly, your selection of meals, and the way you describe them is a critical element. Instead of a simple menu listing for “Boeuf Bourgignon”, use compelling adjectives to build desire in the customer for your offered meal. Instead, try the following:

Beouf Bourgignon

Seared cubes of select-cut succulent beef served in a marinade of creamed country mushrooms.

Most restaurants worth their salt of course have taken at least some steps in this direction. However, there is much more to you can do to engage your customers and deliver your unique brand experience before they open the door.

Menu Listings

I was recently invited to a restaurant by a friend, and when I sat down to read their menu, I found that it was very difficult to choose a meal. After some thought, I realised that this was due to the cluttered menu design, such that it was hard to parse one meal description from another. This made it very difficult to build a set of options in my head, and to narrow these down to my final choice.

The first lesson I took away from this experience was that while of course it is important to maintain a diverse selections of meals on your menu, you shouldn’t have so many that your customers forget the first options they looked at by the time they reach the last. If you refer to studies of memory from the field of psychology, you’ll find that our short-term memory is effective up to about 7+/-2 items, and is effective at processing chunks of related information. Applying this to menus, you can make your customers more likely to engage with your menu if you group your meals under meaningful headings such as ‘Beef’, ‘Chicken’, ‘Fish’, and ‘Vegetarian’, and offer no more that 8 or 9 options under each heading.

The second lesson I took from my experience with this restaurant’s menu was to exploit design principles effectively to help customers parse your menu. For example, consider the following two excerpts, and decide which is the easier to read.

Boeuf Bourgignon Seared cubes of select-cut succulent beef served in a marinade of creamed country mushrooms.

Beef Stew Braised chunks of tender beef stewed with garden vegetables in a thick, home gravy.

vs.

Boeuf Bourgignon

Seared cubes of select-cut succulent beef served in a marinade of creamed country mushrooms.

Beef Stew

Braised chunks of tender beef stewed with garden vegetables in a thick, home gravy.

The same information is available in both versions, but I’m sure you’ll find that the second view, which employs whitespace to separate the menu items, bold text to emphasise the name of the meal, and a new line and italic text to capture the longer description, is a much clearer presentation of the menu items.

The objective of this article was to offer a basic introduction to menu design to help ensure that you exploit your menu so as to engage restaurant-window-shoppers before the even enter your restaurant. If you found this advice of value, search for our follow-up articles on how to better apply your brand experience to your menu design and on the design of menu cover and wine-list covers.