There is a certain charm to walking into a restaurant in the heart of Chinatown and perusing the menus which are posted on the wall and written in some dialect of Chinese in what suspiciously looks like crayon. You can only hope that your server speaks English but you feel fairly satisfied that you are having an authentic Chinese experience. For that restaurant, their menu design was the entire reason their Chinese and other clients filled their tables.
For you, you need to determine what menu design will effectively communicate the flavor of your restaurant to your target market. How do you do that? Trial and error has its merits as does copying another concept, but can you stay in business long enough before you find the menu design that works and how do you know which concept to copy? When you are first putting together your business plan for your restaurant, call upon the expertise and experience of professionals like Atlantic Restaurant Consultants for advice.
The menu design needs to communicate the theme, the passion, the value, and the type of food and service that you offer. Pieces of newspaper tacked on the wall and written on with crayon in Chinese let you know right away that you are going to experience down home authentic Chinese cooking at lower prices. However, that same menu design used in a five star concept, California style restaurant will lose your customer as soon as they step inside your restaurant.
Market research, ingenuity, and the gut feeling that represent the passion for your product are the major ingredients in producing a menu design that will attract your customers to buy food that they know they will enjoy and feel justified in paying for. Again, that is where a consultant with years of experience in private and public restaurant ventures can advise you on what works.
Brightly colored and laminated menu designs for family dining may be more permanent, but they will survive baby knocking over the mustard or ketchup and ruining the pretty paper on which you just spent a fortune. Then again, a freshly printed menu daily inserted into an elegant presentation folder conveys the quality of your meal. A thousand dollar bottle of champagne may be unlikely on a take out menu, but an elegant sheaf of paper declaring the price is well worth reprinting the next day in order to sell another bottle.
Menu design is best managed by an expert who will direct a graphic designer and professional printer to create the end result which, in the long run, drives your buying customer to your tables, day after day, because they desire what your menu design represents. You may feel you are great at Publisher on your own computer, but just wait until you see the results you print out at home or try to post it on your website. Allow the experts with a proven record in menu design to guide you to your success.