It’s an interesting question and has been answered differently over the years. We too have touched on ways to make your menu more effective and about updating your current menu. Let’s talk about how we can make it better. What is ‘better’ in this case? Better would be doing anything to make life easy for your customers while ordering food, keeping your menu relevant and ensuring you see customers order various dishes instead of the few standard best selling ones.

Your menu is the soul of your restaurant. It encompasses every element of what your restaurant represents. All other factors are great to bring people in and turn into customers. But your menu and the food is what will bring them back many times over. And you can do wonders to your current menu without adding anything to it or making any drastic changes.

Highlighting dishes

Unless your restaurant is like Brahmin’s Coffee Bar with just about a handful of dishes that are all popular, you should have dishes on your menu that need to be highlighted. Be it chef’s special, signature or just a few dishes that you’d want to recommend the customer to try. If you look at the business side of things and don’t intervene with the food, sit with your chef and understand the dishes you should be highlighting. Your chef will tell you their strengths and all you need to do is place it right in your menu so it grabs customers’ eyeballs. The top right and the centre of a menu are more likely to get attention from the customer and those are the spots you should place your signature dishes in. You could place it right under the title of the section or even highlight it with a star or a chef’s hat symbol. Be subtle and the customer will get the message.

Precise descriptions

“Hand cut” or “hand battered” things are simply pretentious and doesn’t add anything special to the dish. Words like “sumptuous” and “delectable” don’t mean anything to your customer either. Oh, even the “cooked to perfection” doesn’t do much because, well, that’s what you’re supposed to do – cook it to perfection. Don’t make your descriptions look like you’re trying too hard. Simple yet precise ways to explain what the dish always works. What you should be doing is, keeping the descriptions short, precise and with suitable adjectives. For example, “tender chicken pieces simmered in coconut broth laced with warm spices” is a lot more appealing and gives the customer an idea of what the dish would be like as opposed to “succulent chicken cooked in coconut broth with fresh hand pounded spices”. Don’t simply leave the dish to their imagination with “enough said” or “no need to tell you what this is”. If all of this seems like much to handle, hire a copywriter who’ll be able to communicate the exact message to your customers.

Grouping foods

This isn’t new for you. But take a good look at your menu to see if you’ve been grouping all your dishes correctly. There’s the classic – appetizers/starters, salads, soups, main course and desserts. Another kind breaks it down further by grouping proteins – poultry, seafood, vegetables and so on. Depending on the kind of establishment yours is, this kind of grouping will help customers make decisions easily. You can place your signature dishes in line with these groups too. For pubs and bars, it’s best to go with the current trend of small plates, big plates, mains and the bar menu. Your patrons come in groups and look for easy bar eats, only the portions vary. If you structure your menu accordingly, both parties benefit from it.

Layout basics

Please hire a consultant who works with restaurant menus and understands what size, colours, fonts and placement of dishes mean, and how they all affect a customer’s psyche. If you don’t want a consultant, understand what your needs are and hire an illustrator (there are so many young independent ones today) to get the job done. Even your blackboard menu can be made more attractive with some colour and interesting font. Keep in mind your branding and all the colours you use in the restaurant and in its name. Use few of them to highlight dishes on the blackboard to draw eyes. Specials menu on the blackboard is a lot more appealing than a waiter rattling it all to the customer. You can read more about how colours affect appetite here.

—

In short, restructure and clean up your menu without adding dishes to it to make it more appealing to your customers. It’ll help the menu get fresh new look to show off your best dishes and get people to order more and different dishes.