Six Strategies of Effective Restaurant Menus
Creating the best and most useful design for menu printing can be a task unto itself. While other restaurants may just print menus on the fly (emphasizing more on the food), a good and strategic, restaurant owner sees menu printing as an integral part of restaurant management.
While the food is the main product of the business, they think of full color menus as the salespersons and marketing agents of the restaurant. Therefore, when it comes to menu printing, the same focus must be present in designing them as in the cooking of the dishes.
For the strategic restaurant owner, you can apply six main strategies to create effective restaurant menus.
1. Pictures are King – Every restaurant owner should know this. Pictures are the best things that you can place in a menu. Almost everyone who eats in a restaurant have a high chance of ordering something that they can see in a picture.
This is because most of us can be visual as well as nasal with our “food” senses. Printing high resolution and sumptuous photographs of your specialties will almost guarantee people choosing them for their meal. Once people see something good to eat, the deal is basically done.
2. Nice understandable descriptions - Of course however, pictures are not the only story for menu printing. If you placed pictures for every kind of dish you have, you will get yourself a catalog in the process. So have pictures of your specialties, but for the rest of your dishes you will have to do descriptions.
Always remember to compose nice and very understandable descriptions of your dishes. Not everyone can know about the various types of ingredients and cooking styles. So try to describe dishes clearly, if it is fried, boiled, grilled, dried etc. Also, try to be as nice and polite as possible however brief your description is. Your customer service attitude must also extend to your menus.
3. Clear but artful fonts – Also, do not forget to use font styles that are clear but are still aesthetically pleasing. People must be able to easily read the name of your dishes and their description lest they order the wrong thing. Most menus usually have a slightly stylish font for a dish's name while beneath a clear and simpler font is used for the description.
4. Emphasis on Specialties – Do not forget as well to place emphasis on all your specialties. Always place them on the top and center of a menu so that people will easily notice them. Try to mark specialties with bolder text and sometimes you may even opt to use an icon or symbol indicator that says “house specialty” or something similar. Since your specialties are the best of what you can offer to your customers so much so that it pays to put more emphasis on them.
5. Using different languages – Printing your menu in different languages is also one of the greatest strategies that you can use for your restaurant, especially if you notice that you are drawing in a more international crowd. For example, you may usually have an increased amount of Japanese tourists going to your restaurant. Why not print a Japanese menu just for them? They will find your place more welcoming and they might even recommend it to others if you do. You can do this to every significant amount of foreign customers you have to increase your standing with them.
6. Detachable and customizable pages – Lastly, do not forget to have detachable and customizable pages. With the dynamic nature of the food business, it pays to have your menus easily customizable. If you have a new dish you want to promote or you want to emphasize on a different kind of dish for each season a customizable menu will be very useful. You can change pages at will giving you a chance to focus on the dishes that you want.
Those are the six main strategies that you can use for menu printing. Hopefully you have learned a lot from these strategies. Take note though that they are just guides, and you should not be limited to only them. Think of your own menu strategy if you can to further improve your restaurant menus and hopefully your business in general.
Learn about the developments in menu printing.
About the Author:Kaye Z. Marks is an avid follower and writer of the developments in the color printing and online printing industries.
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Six Strategies of Effective Restaurant Menus