How to Create a Restaurant Menu

Menus are restaurants’ main draws. To build a loyal customer base, restaurants must offer fresh, reasonably priced meals and drinks in restaurant menu system.

85% of Americans mention food quality as a reason for choosing a restaurant, while 69% cite pricing. This means that most diners choose where to eat based on the type, price, and quality of the cuisine.

Creating a restaurant menu might vary greatly. Corporate offices and franchisors may dictate franchisees’ menus. Independent restaurant operators starting a new location must choose food vendors, menu items, dining room menus, promote the menu online, and change the menu for profitability.

53% of adults feel takeaway and delivery are “important” to their lifestyle. To attract them, restaurants must provide takeaway and delivery. Kitchens must be stocked with to-go containers, and the menu may need to be adjusted for these şişli escort selections.

This essay will show how to develop, create, price, and optimise a restaurant menu to check off all of these boxes.

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Holiday Menu Tips 

Seasonal sales might rise 26%. Thanksgiving menu ideas? See restaurant examples.

1. Respect restaurant concept

First, identify the restaurant’s idea. A restaurant should start by doing a few things well.

A startup pizzeria should focus on finding high-quality ingredients, devising distinctive pizza recipes and topping combinations, and securing appropriate kitchen equipment.

The pizzeria can then focus on supplements and compromises. Restaurants should complement their main meals. Salads, sandwiches, and pasta are options for a pizzeria.

At this point, restaurants should identify menu items they’re avoiding to focus on their idea. New pizzerias may provide brunch, beverages, or baked products as tradeoffs. No restaurant can please everyone, and the wider the menu, the harder it is to optimise kitchen processes and find popular items.

2. Section menu

Once a restaurant recognizes its menu’s theme, it’s easy to categorise dishes. A high-end steakhouse may offer:

• Apps/Starters
• Snacks
• Main-course chicken
• Steaks
• Entrees
• Pastaentrées
• Desserts

This stage has two approaches. First, decide which sections the restaurant’s ideal menu would include, then add dishes. The alternative option is to divide the dishes into categories and develop sections from there.

Categorising a menu helps customers and management. Menu organisation makes choosing ingredients, controlling inventories, and reporting sales easier.

3. Food allergies and dietary restrictions

It is crucial for restaurants to concentrate on the major menu items, but customers should not be excluded in any way. Steakhouses and seafood restaurants should provide something suitable for pescatarians and vegetarians to eat on their menus. If you make every item on the menu inedible, you run the risk of losing customers who follow restrictive diets, such as the keto or paleo diets, along with their dining companions.

Food allergies make the situation more difficult. When it is practicable, a menu should be prepared in such a way that it is possible for everyone to enjoy the food at the restaurant while still adhering to the concept. Celiac sufferers may find gluten-free spaghetti at Italian restaurants that serve the cuisine.

4.Set prices

Prices can’t be too expensive to scare away customers or too low to put the restaurant out of business. Food costs 25-30% of the menu price, however this varies. Pasta and desserts often have greater markups than other menu items.

When launching a restaurant, owners should contact different food providers to discover who has the greatest deals. The restaurant makes more money without losing quality by using the greatest ingredients at the best price.

5. Menu design

Following the completion of the plan, create a menu for the restaurant. Creating a menu with the goal of maximising profits is an aspect of meal engineering. Restaurants will utilise various psychological techniques to draw attention to their most delicious foods. Menu design and dish descriptions are examples.

Design

Its design is eye-catching. The menu’s colours and typeface should be on-brand and immediately identifiable with the restaurant, whether online or printed.

Menu engineering involves highlighting the restaurant’s most popular (and profitable) items in a distinctive way. These items can be placed at the top of the menu, in a shaded box with bold font, or in a special area. Shy Bird in Cambridge, MA boxes its renowned “SB Dunks” to distinguish them from starters, snacks, and sandwiches.

6. Post the menu online

Once complete, menus should be posted online for guests. Since 77% of guests check a restaurant’s website before coming, this is a crucial marketing strategy.

Online menus allow for digital on-premise ordering and payments. Guests can use their phones to peruse the menu, place orders, and pay the tab online.

Contactless eating allows menu pricing and selection to fluctuate based on availability, but it’s also a strong marketing tool for eateries. Guests can opt into a restaurant’s loyalty program after paying their bill to receive tailored messages and discounts, boosting customer engagement and retention.

As visitors return to on-premise dining, contactless dining remains a favoured alternative and can help a restaurant restore to normal if short-staffed.

7. Check Menu Options Often

Menu engineering includes regular menu analysis. The restaurant should examine each item’s popularity and profitability every 6-12 months. Menu items are categorised as follows:

Profitable, popular. These are the menu’s stars and should stay.

Profitable but unpopular. These puzzles need tweaking to gain popularity. Allowing guests to substitute an ingredient, highlighting it on the menu, or marginally reducing its price could make it a star.

High popularity, low profitability. These plowhorses attract customers but hurt the restaurant’s bottom line. To boost profits, consider reducing portion sizes, using cheaper ingredients, or hiking menu prices.

Low profit, low fame. Dogs should be removed to streamline back-of-house operations and make room for new dishes.

Menu engineering keeps a restaurant’s menu profitable. This analysis is done using a menu engineering worksheet, which plots menu item success on an X-Y axis.

Menu optimization for takeout and delivery

Online ordering, takeaway, and delivery won’t slow down soon. Online food delivery might reach $152 billion by 2024.

Restaurants must service this market to get the most customers. Here’s how.

1. Travel-friendly items

The sooner guests eat most foods, the better. No one wants to expect sizzling wings and pizza only to get lukewarm food. This could mean removing items from a delivery menu that don’t travel well, especially when using third-party couriers. If the restaurant offers in-house delivery, temperature may not be as important.

Takeout is more flexible than delivery because guests take the food home. Invest in containers that keep the dish’s temperature well, and separate cooler and warmer meals in separate containers. Nobody likes cold chicken in a grilled chicken salad.

2. Offer takeout, delivery

Popular delivery alternatives like sandwiches and fried chicken may collide with a restaurant’s tradeoffs.

Instead of adding or removing menu items, make off-premise options. Seamore’s, a sustainable seafood restaurant in NYC, switched to takeout during the pandemic. Keeping with their restaurant’s idea, they packaged several of their popular dishes into at-home meal kits, appealing to families and couples with distinctive to-go options.

Plate full with food

Check if eateries that serve alcohol can sell cocktail kits to-go. With a recipe and pre-measured ingredients, guests may mix the bar’s signature cocktail (at a high margin for the business). Dine Machine’s website sells cocktail kits.

3. Optimise online ordering

Online ordering requires a restaurant’s website. An online ordering mechanism on the restaurant’s website offers menu personalization and reflects the brand.

BentoBox allows restaurants to highlight their most popular online-ordering items. BentoBox restaurants can post food images and menu descriptions.

Online ordering provides the establishment unlimited control. Running a restaurant’s online ordering system through its website eliminates third-party commission fees, collects guest data, and promptly updates menu availability.

BentoBox can optimise your restaurant’s menu for takeout, delivery, and on-premise eating. 

Menu Time

Restaurants will have a solid foundation upon which to construct a business, generate income, and welcome enthusiastic, returning customers once they have selected menu items and categories and constructed a print and web menu respectively.

When starting a restaurant with the intention of catering to customers like these, it is essential to have a website where customers can place orders and pay online.