Mistakes To Avoid While Creating The Perfect Restaurant Menu

Apart from all the hospitality and services you provide, the foremost reason customers come to your restaurant is for the food you offer. And your menu is where your food gives its first impression. It is also one of the most powerful yet underrated Sales & Marketing tools.

Now Let’s See If You’re Not Making These Common Mistakes While Crafting Your Perfect Restaurant Menu

1. No long sentences

Keep your restaurant menu descriptions sweet and short. No boring information or long sentences to explain the dish. It should be easy to understand and simple.

2. No Fancy Names On The Menu

Avoid using heavy adjectives and fancy foreign references to name your dishes. Understand your target audience well and make sure you use references and words that they understand or are relatable to them. Also, you can glorify your menu item but not in a way that it comes out as an exaggeration.

3. Poor Categorization Of Food In The Restaurant Menu

If your menu has no structure, sections, or categorization it could be one big reason why customers can take up so much time to decide on their order. Appetizers, soups, salads, main course, drinks, desserts, etc. should be categorized together and in order of serving. For example, desserts can’t be introduced before the main course on the menu.

4. Too Many Options

Listing more than 10 dishes in one section doesn’t actually help. With too many options on the menu, the customer’s decision-making skills get slower and you end up serving lesser tables. Also, people tend to choose the cheapest option available when they are overwhelmed with so many options.

Too many options on the menu aren’t viable for the long term as it’s difficult to maintain the stock required for a large menu. It can actually increase the food costs for your restaurant business.

5. Same Old Same Old Menu Items

Not introducing or experimenting with newer menu items can be a big turn-off for your loyal customers. The introduction of new menu items depending on seasons, festivals, and trends is a must to keep your restaurant in-trend and sustainable. You can analyze your target audience and understand your customer behavior using your POS data to understand what new menu item your audience would want to try out!

6. Too Much Focus On Pricing

Don’t throw too much light and attention on the prices of the menu items by keeping the font of prices different, bigger, or bolder. Make sure the prices of menu items listed on a page don’t vary too much for customers to subconsciously choose the cheaper one.

Keep the focus of the menu on the dish, ingredients, and other details instead of just the price.

7. Wrong Information Or Misprints

Avoid any kinds of misprints like wrong prices, wrong menu descriptions, spelling errors, etc. You may need to change your menu details from time to time given changes in price, the introduction of new items, design changes, etc.

8. No Opportunity To Upsell

If you are not upselling your menu items at your restaurant then you are most certainly losing out on sales and higher revenue big time. Train your waiters to upsell your menu items. Even without the waiters, your menu should be such that it upsells the items on its own. Add-on options like extra mayo, sugar, chocolate, cheese, olive oil, etc are an amazing way to upsell your products without a waiter’s indulgence.

You should invest in carefully designing your menu such that your highly profitable and highly popular items get the most focus.

9. Missing Out On Customer Psychology

Restaurant marketing and customer psychology work hand in hand. Menus are your restaurant’s silent salespeople, and the way you categorize menu items, price them, and employ colors and graphics can encourage customers to order more.

Every menu is carefully constructed to persuade you into making certain decisions, especially those that will ultimately make you spend more money.

10. Not Making The Most Out Of The Menu Space

• Avoid creating clutter on the menu by using multiple pictures
• Stick to 1-2 kinds of fonts on the same page to make sure scanning the page is not difficult
• Keep it clean and readable, and leave enough white space on the page
• Make sure your background is not overshadowing the fonts on the page
• Avoid typos or spelling mistakes
• Make sure your menu goes hand in hand with the vibe of your brand and ambiance
• The size of your menu should be in the correct ratio to the size of the table. Too large or too small menus on the table can look awkward.

An efficient menu design is not a cakewalk. It’s a careful analysis of your POS data, customer behavior patterns, and your food cost per item. You can also take professional help from a menu designer if your budget approves.

Mistakes To Avoid While Creating The Perfect Restaurant Menu