The restaurant menu is one of the core pillars of your guest experience, and it’s your restaurant’s most important selling tool. Whether it’s printed, online, or on a menu board above a counter, a well-designed menu can boost your profitability while enhancing the guest experience.

We’re going to get into the 10-step process involved in developing and designing a new or improved menu through menu maker. For inspiration, check out these free, customizable menu templates.

 

How to Make a Restaurant Menu?

A restaurant menu is the printed or online list of the food and drinks offered by a restaurant. There are few hard and fast rules when it comes to building a menu, because every restaurant’s needs will be unique to their concept.

If you can’t afford a designer, and want to take a stab at making a menu yourself, just follow this simple 10-step process on how to create a restaurant menu, or start working off of a menu template to get you started. Create eye-catching menu design using Lisi Menu Maker and level up your restaurant marketing.

1. Write Out all Menu Items

Before you dive into design, you have to learn to write a restaurant menu. Using Excel, a Google Sheet, or even pen and paper, list out all of the meals you want to offer. Google Sheets is great for this, because it’s easy to cut, copy, and paste different items, and the sheet will save automatically. Click here to use our template. Don’t forget to click File > Make a Copy for your own version.

2. Categorize Menu Items

Categorize all the items into appetizer, entree, dessert, or any other category. Then, decide which menu items you want to appear most prominently on the menu; you may want appetizers to appear at the top of your menu, and you may want a particular appetizer to be at the top of the list because it’s a star — high profit, high popularity — according to your menu engineering worksheet. Simply move around your menu items until they’re in the exact order you want them to appear on the menu.

3. Set Menu Prices

Notice that we haven’t added prices to our spreadsheet yet? That’s because prices aren’t decided arbitrarily and they warrant a food cost deep-dive. It’s worth taking the time to learn how to price a restaurant menu.

Menu prices – and how you portray them – are the most important aspect of the restaurant menu.

If you’re working off of a previous menu, add in your current prices, and then take a step back to analyse them. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Based on the restaurant sales data in your point of sale system, could you afford to tweak this menu items’ price a little bit to make it more appealing?

Conversely, if you’ve recently had to increase prices in order to pay your staff better or pay for benefits, use your menu as an opportunity to explain that — language like “thanks to these small increases in menu prices, we’ve been able to pay for all of our team’s health insurance” works great and helps connect your customers to the realities of the staff they love.

If you’re really starting from scratch, you’ll need to figure out how to price your menu in order to bring in the most profit while delighting your guests.

Our menu engineering course can help you learn how to make data-based decisions on how to price your menu based on your inventory prices and food cost percentages. Even established restaurants could benefit from a refresher on how to use data to make these types of decisions.

4. Create Menu Descriptions

Next is the fun part: we haven’t touched the “description” column yet in the sheet.

You could hire a copywriter to come up with menu item descriptions, but the best menu descriptions come from the heart — and right from the source. Consult the chef who created the menu items, think about the story behind each and every meal – the inspiration for its creation, the sourcing of its ingredients, the effort it takes to make – and write down a short description of each menu item on your sheet.

Use descriptive and enticing adjectives — like refreshing, crispy, savoury, tangy, sour, sweet, crunchy — where possible, but don’t go overboard.

5. Decide on a Menu Colour Scheme

Now that you have all your menu items laid out on the sheet in an order that makes sense, take a little break from staring at cells and start thinking about design. Choose a colour scheme for your menu that reflects your restaurant brand. This can be as simple as choosing three colours you might want to see on the menu, or deciding that you want your menu to be black and white to save money on printing.

6. Design Your Restaurant Menu

Now comes the hard part: translating all your hard work on that sheet to a menu design. If you’re hiring a designer, simply giving them your menu item spreadsheet and colour scheme makes their life so much easier.

If not, you can use software like PhotoADKing and use these menu templates as a jumping-off point. As you do, keep in mind these menu design best practices:

  • A menu has to be easy to digest. As some might say, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Your customers will be overwhelmed by a large menu, so try to keep it to one or two pages.
  • Remember the golden triangle. Our eyes typically start in the middle of a page, then move to the top right and top left, so consider putting high-margin dishes at the centre and upper right corner of your menu.
  • Use dollar signs strategically. A study at Cornell found that diners who ordered from a menu without dollar signs ($) spent significantly more than those who ordered from a traditionally priced menu. Consider removing dollar signs from your menu, and don’t list menu prices in a single column so it’s easy for customers to compare.

For more insights like these, check out our menu engineering course’s section on menu design.

7. Restaurant Menu Photos

Printed menus benefit from white space, and the more photos or icons you add, the more distracted customers are from your actual content: the food, and those awesome descriptions you just wrote.

You may want to include photos of your most profitable menu items, but these photos need to be high quality – and that quality needs to translate to print. You may have to hire a food photographer to take these photos because bad photos can be worse than no photos. Work on your food presentation skills first, and then hire a photographer or a friend to take the perfect photo for your menu.

8. Choose Menu Fonts, Spacing, and Composition

You have a colour scheme, a general idea of how you want your menu items to be laid out on the page, and possibly a few photos you want to include. Now, it’s time to put it all together to create a restaurant menu.

At this point, many restaurateurs hire a menu designer or turn to menu templates to give them a starting point. It can take an hour, a day, or a week to go through different iterations, considering margins, spacing, fonts, and overall composition. You could create a simple menu like Red Feather did or a more complicated menu like Maudie’s. Keep iterating, and don’t be afraid to ask for help – from friends, family members, designers, and even existing customers – to find the best fit for your menu.

Also, don’t forget: updating your menu regularly should be easy. If you don’t leave space to add or remove menu items over time, especially if your menu changes seasonally, then you may have to start this whole process over again. As many guests – especially the loyal ones that keep coming back – will remember your menu design and where to find their favorite items, you’ll want to make sure it’s easy to update, so you don’t have to overhaul your menu design again and again.

 

9. Select the Final Menu Layout

Come up with a few design choices to share with your business partners and staff, and vote on which you think is best for your restaurant brand. Your stakeholders will want to review the content – exactly how you’re describing each menu item – as well as the prices and the cohesiveness of your brand.

Go through the approval process, and select the menu that you’re most excited about. You could even argue for the design you think will increase sales based on data from your restaurant point of sale.

 

10. Proofread and Print Your Menu

Finally, it’s time to print your restaurant menu. But first – take a moment to proofread your menu and send it to someone who hasn’t been staring at it for the past week. One misplaced comma or small typo could change your guests’ perception of the restaurant. Don’t skip this step, because if you do, you could waste a lot of money printing menus that will just end up in the trash.