Recent Trends in Restaurant Menu Designs
When is the last time you updated your menu? People will often look at a restaurant menu not only for what they want to eat, but for the design itself. If you hand people an old-fashioned menu that hasn’t been updated in years, they are going to think the same thing about your food – old-fashioned and outdated.
Understanding some of the trends with restaurant menus can help you to make some updates to your own menu so that people will enjoy deciding what they want to eat. It can say a lot about your restaurant, your theme, and prepare people for what is going to come.
One-Sided
More and more menus are becoming one-sided. This allows you to keep the menu offerings as simple as possible. You may not want to go into depth with descriptions and instead allow your staff to provide information to diners. You want to make sure that people are able to see the entire menu all at once.
Keep it Simple
Keep the menu as simple as you can. Leave off the story of how your restaurant came into existence unless there is something really phenomenal about the restaurant. Organize the menu and tell people what is available. Make it easy for them to understand.
Don’t Laminate
Don’t laminate the menu because this is a way of dating your menu. Even though you may want to be able to keep it clean, most hostesses and servers forget – and this causes food to cling to them for the next guest to deal with. It’s best to print extra paper menus and then throw the ones that get dirty away.
Restaurant Menu – Keep Dessert Off
Keep dessert off of the main menu. Leave people guessing as to what the desserts are so that you can present it on a separate menu after dinner. This will also ensure that diners don’t skip the appetizer.
Try a Chalkboard
If you are constantly creating new items or you have daily specials that change from night to night, you may want to try a chalkboard. This can be in the form of an easel at the front of the restaurant for people to see when they come in, or you can paint an entire wall in the restaurant using the special chalkboard paint. This will allow you to use some chalk and write out the specials, which also helps to show that you are eco-friendly and avoid printing when you can.
There are plenty of things that you can do in order to brand your menu. Be sure to use an easy-to-read font, and you may also want to have big photos to sell some of your most popular dishes. Just make sure that the photos are accurate as to what a person is going to get when they ordered the dish. Don’t be afraid of redesigning your menu from time to time just to keep things fresh. You also want to make sure to update the menus periodically as you change the menu to avoid “86-ing” various items.
