Discover The Insider Strategies That Make Your Restaurant Menu An Important Part Of Your Marketing Scheme

A friend of mine once asked, “I recently hired a restaurant consultant. What else can I get him to teach me other than how to manage my business?” I raised the coffee to my lips and gave it some thought. Then I said, “The second most important thing you could get a consultant to teach you is how to design your restaurant menu.” I looked at my friend. “Yes, that’s about right,” I said.

Most people think the point of a menu is to show the customer what’s available in your restaurant. But here is the thing. The restaurant menu can also be designed in such a way as to steer the customer away from the unprofitable (but cheap) dishes and draw their attention towards the more profitable (but more expensive) offerings. This is where the restaurant consultant comes in.

But you don’t always need a restaurant consultant to tell you what to do. Here are a few basic tips on how to design an effective restaurant menu that works.

1. Look up, and then to the right
The upper right corner of the restaurant menu is crucial because the customer’s eyes instinctively float to this area upon sitting down at the table and opening the menu. Place a delicious, high-quality photograph of one of your most profitable dishes in this section.

2. No Man’s Land
This is where unprofitable menu items go. No Man’s Land is the most inconspicuous section of your restaurant menu.

3. Menu price anchor
Below the photograph is the restaurant’s menu price anchor. Here you can strategically list expensive dishes alongside menu items with high profit. The aim is to create the illusion of your high-profit offerings being “cheap” compared to your most expensive—but low-profit—dishes, whose main purpose is to create that illusion.

4. Special boxes
Dishes, or beverages, in boxes draw the customer’s attention. What’s so special about that seafood dish that they put it in a box and not in a list alongside everything else? Your customers will find the answer when they order it.

5. No columns, please
Most restaurant owners do this. But top restaurant operators know better than to design their menu items in an ordered list and encourage customers to choose from the cheapest dishes available. If it can’t be helped, at least stay away from leader dots connecting the names of the dishes to their respective prizes.

The restaurant menu is an important part of your – or any other restaurant owner’s – marketing scheme. Design it carefully. If you have to, hire a restaurant consultant just for that purpose. You won’t be disappointed when customers are ordering your most profitable dish offerings.