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Your menu is the heart and soul of the entire restaurant. More than the ambiance and décor, it is the food you have on offer that keeps your customers coming back and recommending your business to others.
This is why effective menu engineering—crafting the perfect menu to influence your customers’ choices and get them to focus on the dishes that you want them to order—is so important.
Here are some top tips for bettering your food menu.
1. Organization
Make sure your menu is clear, simple, and easy to read. A good layout, for example, listing similar foods under a broad heading (e.g., “Pastas” and “Chicken Main Dishes”), makes your menu more accessible.
Poorly organized menus, containing tiny print or having too many tedious descriptions make customers lose interest quickly.
Streamlining your menu to offer the best selection of what your kitchen has to offer helps diners choose what they want quickly and confidently.
2. High-Quality Photos
You can expect menu items accompanied by photos to be popular.
Including too many photographs may make your menu overly cluttered. Still, a few good-quality images that make your dishes look especially appealing go a long way in increasing the customer’s perception of how appetizing any particular dish is.
3. Use Descriptions
Ambiguous labels for your dishes can leave diners perplexed and can take up valuable time for serving staff when menu items have to be explained again and again.
Including concise and enticing descriptions on the menu can help guests know exactly what they are ordering and avoid confusion.
They can also avoid placing orders for items that may include ingredients that they are allergic to or may otherwise want to avoid.
4. Understand Visual Paths
People usually start reading the menu from the top right corner, and their line of sight goes down items listed on the right before those on the left.
Dishes added right after category headings are also more likely to be focused on.
Making sure your signature dishes and those with the highest profit margins are mentioned at these prime spots will help you curate a better menu that adds to your business.