Running a restaurant is no easy task. Apart from ensuring that the business is going well, you also need to ensure that you’re serving delicious meals and providing your customers the best service as possible. With those things in mind, you might lose sight of the importance of your menu design, as it can significantly affect your business, allowing you to earn (or lose) more sales.
After the horrendous journey of starting a restaurant, when a customer finally arrives at your place, the first thing he’ll see will be the menu. To entice your customers to order more items, below are a few useful tips on how you can design your restaurant menu to be a bit more mouthwatering and effective:
Emphasize Your Best-Selling Meals
Best-selling foods are best-selling for a reason. There’s a reason why people would constantly purchase a specific meal from your menu. To make sure your customers know about these best-selling meals, you need to emphasize these on your menu. For example, Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, one of the best BBQ Houston TX, emphasizes their Smoking Meal Deal and Brisket Chili Walking Taco on their menu.
One great way you can emphasize your best-sellers is by creating an entire page within your menu design – dedicated to those meals. This can be very helpful, especially if you have plenty of best sellers on your menu.
You can emphasize the words ‘best-selling’ or even include a recognition that your food had. It could be the top BBQ according to a specific food blog or even a news outlet. Alternatively, if you want to keep your menu minimal, you should consider adding the words ‘best-seller’ to the name of the meal besides.
Hire A Food Photographer
One of the best ways to allow your food to look mouthwatering is by showing people what to expect on their table. No matter how tasty your food is, if you cannot show its full potential to your customers, you might not be able to get the number of orders you’re anticipating. People will now know how delicious a meal is until it’s on their table.
To entice your customers into ordering your meals, hiring a food photographer will help make your meals mouthwatering. With the right angle, decorations, color combination, and presentation, you can make your simple dish look incredibly delicious to the eye.
Moreover, it would be best to level your food expectations by mixing up the best recipe and ingredients. That’ll help your customers to come back for more.
Provide Numerous Photos
If you’d like your menu to look fun and informative, you should provide photos of every food you’re offering to the table, not just the ones that are best sellers, but every meal you offer. This will help your customers understand what to expect once they order your meal.
As you add photos of each meal, you should try to make it look as tasty as possible. You can place the images beside the actual food name or arrange them in a separate column and label them appropriately. Customers tend to order more once they’re sure what they can expect once your waiter serves it to their table.
Use Appetizing Food Name
Nothing feels fancier than using a food name that sounds appetizing. To increase your chances of having more orders for your meals, try to be creative with your food names by allowing it to sound delicious and flavorful at the same time. However, you need to be careful as you might over-reach, not allowing your customers to identify what type of food you’re serving.
In addition to the food name, it would help to provide a short description of the meal on the menu. That’ll help your customers save time asking the waiter whether the food might contain any allergens.
As you write your description, try to be as informative as possible while still allowing it to sound tasty. Use scrumptious adjectives that’ll entice your customers to order the meal.
Be Minimal
Some of the most mouthwatering menu designs out there are primarily minimal as they focus on providing the exact info that’s required. The less design you have on your menu, the more your customers will focus on it, giving them more time to think about what to order.
As you go with minimal design, you should use complementing colors as well. If you go too crazy with colors, your customers might not enjoy or get confused browsing through your menu and simply look for ones that they’re comfortable ordering. To direct your customers into checking your menu, keep the design as minimal as possible.
The Final Verdict
Designing a menu isn’t a walk in a park. Your restaurant’s menu plays a vital role in how your customers perceive the meals you’re offering. With that, you should design it to be as mouth-watering as possible. Once your customers are intrigued to find out what your food tastes like, they’ll most likely order more of them, increasing your sales.
Charles Vallena is the founder and managing editor of Cuppabean.com, a coffee blog that helps people make better coffee by providing expert insights, recipes, and in-depth reviews on coffee makers. Follow Cuppabean on Facebook here.
