6 Must-Read Tips For The Best Bar Menu

Creating a perfect bar menu is all about understanding customers’ behavior and creating signature drinks that suit their pallets. Although understanding when to sell the classics and when to serve your delicacies might seem a hard task, it is not so. If you are looking to update or create a new menu for your bar, keep reading!

6 Best Tips To Create An Amazing Bar Menu

The menu is one of the two points of interaction in any bar; the second one is the staff. A well-designed menu and a well-trained staff can improve the overall performance and sales of the bar.

1. Know Your Customers

What kind of liquor and cocktails you can serve depends highly on the customer. Aspects like your customers’ demographic, their purchasing power, the location of your bar, the menu, the theme of the bar, etc. are all interrelated. If your bar is located in the city’s prime area, then you are more likely to be serving a more elite crowd who have a particular pallet for high-end and refined liquor and cocktails. But this changes if you are serving a college-going crowd who might not be able to splurge. Depending on these factors, the bar menu might change. There is no point in buying and storing expensive liquor if it does not sell. But at the same time, make sure you experiment and surprise your customers.

If you are an aspirant bar owner, start by serving cocktails to your close friends and family members, take their input, and improvise. With this, you would understand the art of putting the right drink at the right customer’s table just by observation!

2. Create Multiple Menu

There is a hack to selling more drinks and food. Create two separate menus; one for cocktails and one for food. By this, you would be able to push your cocktail menu more during the slow hours. If you are hosting events at your bar, then you can push food menus to increase food sales during happy hours. Two separate menus give enough space for both the menu and do not bind into one bulky one. Also, by offering two separate menus you reduce the chances of overwhelming the customers and confusing them. This trick does not just apply to bars and breweries but also to cafes that offer beverages and food with them.

Creating different menus gives the bar to experiment and offer variety. The head chef and bartenders can then work hand-in-hand to develop menus that complement each other while offering variety. The next process then would be to train your staff in assisting the customers in picking the best siders for their cocktails!

3. Mention Ingredients

Your customer should know what they are drinking. Writing a one-liner description of cocktails in the bar menu can increase sales drastically. This is because the customer has full liberty to choose what they wish to drink. Writing descriptions reduces the workload of your staff who don’t have to spend time explaining the ingredients to customers. This way they can focus on more efficient customer service. And if the customers wish to eliminate some ingredients or add a few from their drink, they can easily do so. Also, you can use this opportunity to create a unique and quick one-line description of your cocktails! Mentioning ingredients helps especially if you are planning to experiment and offer your signature drinks.

4. Get Creative With Names

Creating a bar menu is all about upselling the already sold or created cocktail recipes. All the bars serve the classics like Pina colada, Margarita, Bloody Mary, Mojito, Manhatten, etc. But often they do give it their spin or like to create a new cocktail out of it. When there is so much creativity going into it, then that drink deserves a special name. Giving drinks unique names creates curiosity. And generate enough curiosity, paired with a good description and delicious ingredients, then your customers would try it even if it’s pricier.

5. Add Pictures And Colours

Continuing from the last point, adding pictures of your drinks makes them interesting. Bartenders like to experiment not just with flavors, liquors, and ingredients but also with colors. When all of it is beautifully placed then the cocktail becomes Instagram-worthy! By curating an image and color-intensive menu, you can not just engage your customers in the bar, but also attract more customers digitally. A diverse menu design is a great step towards branding!

Once your customers start clicking pictures of their cocktails and start tagging your bar on their Instagram, that’s organic marketing right there! You can leverage their followers to interact with your potential customers. Eventually, with time, you would’ve built your network of customers on social media and marketed your services to them directly! But building this crowd is a gradual and continuous process. So keep Instagramming!

6. Focus On Quality

The quality of paper or material you will be using for your bar menu would reflect your brand and your standard. The cheap or low-quality paper would tear easily, depreciate faster, and hence, reflect badly on your customers. But using high-end material would position your bar well among the top bars of the city. And if you wish to upgrade with time, you can always switch to the QR codes!

These are the key aspects that should be considered before creating a perfect bar menu. There is no set template for it; bar menus change as per customers’ needs and market trends. But keeping your menu interesting and service up to the market is always helpful in winning customer loyalty!

A quick tip: Keeping your bar and cocktail stations in clear sight of the customers is a great way of increasing sales! When they would see amazing cocktails being made and served, they are more likely to ask your staff to bring the same for them!

Rely on smart and updated restaurant POS software and the right people to manage your business operations smoothly while you prepare for the next steps of your business.

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