10 restaurant menu design tips to optimize your offerings

Whether embellished with retro illustrations, saddle-stitched and leather-bound or laminated to prevent smudgy BBQ stains, no two menus are the same.

It’s the first item to arrive at the table — even ahead of the chips and salsa or crusty bread and olive oil — and, aside from letting guests know what you serve, it tells the story of your restaurant, sets the stage for the customer experience and helps boost your profitability.

But you can’t just throw a few words together and hit print. Without strategic restaurant menu design, you could miss out on opportunities to move ingredients, cross sell, speed up wait times and build loyalty.

Over the years, customers’ tastes shift, costs rise and suppliers change — so it’s natural that your menu will evolve, too.

Perhaps you’ve been around awhile and want to refresh your look, or you’re opening a restaurant for the first time and need advice. Either way, you’re in the right place to learn how to make your menu as appetizing as your dishes — keeping guests intrigued and employees invested — alongside a powerful, flexible POS.

Read on to learn:

How to use menu engineering to upgrade your menu

Have you ever slid into a booth, picked up a menu and immediately felt overwhelmed? Maybe there were too many choices, a barrage of photos or haphazard formatting with desserts and beers on tap in the same section.

While it’s important that a food menu looks good, structure and intentionally matter, too. Unfortunately, when designing a menu, you can’t just choose a bunch of items with the biggest margins and call it a day.

Instead, determine your most and least profitable items and use menu engineering — a method that optimizes a menu’s popularity and profitability using psychology and strategic design — to influence diners’ purchasing decisions, reduce food waste and boost margins.

With menu engineering, dishes can be categorized simply in four ways:

To help classify your stars, puzzles, plowhorses and dogs, you’ll want to use a POS with inventory tracking and robust sales reporting to get clarity on the performance of each item you serve so you can optimize your offerings and increase your revenue.

For example, with Heartland Restaurant, you can access restaurant sales data and investigate meal popularity and profitability so you can learn exactly what menu items sell (and pair them with a new or less popular item to build interest or enhance profitability).

Once you’ve used your POS reports to help categorize your dishes, it’s time to arrange each item based on eye movement patterns and how menus are often read. Typically, diners look first at the middle of the menu, then at the top right and finally the top left. This is called the Golden Triangle, and it’s the best way to maximize your menu layout and nudge customers toward dishes they’ll enjoy — and that are profitable for you, too.

Based on the Golden Triangle, you’ll want to place your most profitable items in the top left and top right corners, with the top right being a prime location for star items. Plowhorses, popular but less profitable items, can anchor the top left of the page to help draw attention to more profitable items. For added awareness, you can use color, borders or illustrations to star and puzzle items.

On the other hand, the less profitable and less popular items, called dogs, should be placed toward the bottom of the page. If your least profitable items are in the most prominent spot on the menu, your guests will order them time and again — without considering other choices that are just as tasty but more profitable for your eatery.

Some studies show that diners only read menus for an average of 109 seconds, so it should be easy for guests to find what they’re looking for. If you can quickly point them to a popular and profitable item? Even better.

Helpful design tips for a memorable restaurant menu

Imagine running a swanky steakhouse and giving guests greasy laminated menus as they’re seated at their candlelit table. It probably wouldn’t be a dealbreaker for anyone, but branding does matter, and it doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive to incorporate.

You may not have a budget for leather menu covers, and that’s okay. Intentional, cohesive branding — which can include logos, visual identity design, tone of voice and mission and value statements — goes a long way in making a good impression and showcasing your restaurant’s personality.

From your website and social media platforms to the physical door at your restaurant, you want your brand to be reflected wherever your guests can interact — and menus are no exception.

So, how can I design a restaurant menu?

Whether you’re established and cutting costs or starting out and conserving dollars, you can use the tips below and resources like the Canva menu maker or other menu template options to create an on-brand, easily-digestible menu.

In addition to branded fonts and a thoughtful color scheme, here are some things to consider as you bring your restaurant menu design to life:

Size: Believe it or not, a lengthy menu can hurt sales. When it takes longer for your customers to place their orders, it slows table turn time and can interfere with FOH and BOH operations. If possible, try to limit your menu to one to two pages. Depending on the nature of your restaurant, you might need separate menus for different times of the day — like an appetizers and bar menu for happy hour — or days of the week if you offer a special Sunday dinner, for example.

Descriptive language: Did you know sales of an item increase by 27% when descriptive language is used? Adjectives like crispy, tangy, refreshing and crunchy can ignite the senses, and are especially useful for star dishes or for cuisine that your customers may not be as familiar with.

Pictures: If you’ve ever stood in line at an ice cream truck overwhelmed by all the visuals plastered across the side, you can imagine your customers might feel the same way if every dish on your menu is accompanied by a photo. A handful of pictures can be helpful, especially for online menus, but too many can have the opposite effect. And don’t underestimate the power of white space. It’s fun to infuse your menu with colorful, charming design elements, but don’t be afraid of a little white space — it can actually help with reader comprehension.

Icons: Easily communicate helpful information to diners with icons indicating if a dish is vegetarian or vegan, gluten-free or dairy-free. You can also use icons to denote a spice level or indicate best-sellers and customer favorites. (Speaking of allergens and preferences, now’s a good time to point out that a POS with detailed reporting — including replacement suggestions and full menu descriptions with specific ingredients and allergens — that can be accessed anywhere on any device is very helpful when an item is 86’d or a customer needs specific meal information.)

What are some common mistakes in restaurant menu design?

Now that you know what makes a high-quality menu, let’s review some practices to avoid.

Not including helpful dietary information: Some restaurants, like those with 20 or more locations, are required by the FDA to display calorie counts for standard menu items. But for the most part, including calorie counts is a personal preference. The FDA also requires a statement about the risks of eating raw or undercooked animal products, and noting that an item is gluten-free is not required but is a helpful accommodation (plus, you’ll save your FOH staff time fielding questions about certain ingredients).

Using dollar signs in your pricing: Studies have shown diners who ordered from menus without dollar signs tend to spend “significantly” more than those who receive menus with dollar signs on the menu. Guests know what the number next to a menu item means and dollar signs can trigger negative correlations with spending money, so list your smashburger as 14 rather than $14. Another tip? Don’t list pricing in a single column — it makes it easier to compare costs, and diners may go for the $12 dish rather than the $17 entree.

Distributing without testing: Before you debut your new menu, double check that there aren’t any typos, the typography you’ve selected is legible and you’ve utilized menu engineering and the Golden Triangle to maximize revenue.

Up next on the list of dos and don’ts? QR code ordering. If your small business was open during the pandemic, you may have utilized a QR code menu to fulfill orders and process payments — no contact required. Let’s take a look at the popularity of QR code menus now, and how it can benefit your business to use digital menus.

How QR codes can boost your menu

Years after the pandemic first began, some restaurant owners wonder if QR code menus are still relevant. One report says yes, showing 78% of customers enjoy QR code ordering and debunking data that it’s no longer a popular ordering option.

So, go ahead and add (or keep) your QR code menu. It can help streamline operations and turn tables faster, plus it makes it easier to update menus when a dish inevitably changes. For most restaurants, it’s best to have a physical menu and utilize QR code menus as a complement for faster, easier ordering.

Offering an online menu is important, too

You know that awesome new menu you’ve created? You can use it online, as well, to expand your reach and boost your revenue.

Don’t worry if you don’t have many graphic design skills (hey, your speciality is serving up irresistible, unforgettable meals and moments). Canva and Adobe both offer professionally-designed templates for physical and digital menus, which is helpful if you need both since customers can easily identify your restaurant’s brand when the menus match.

With an online menu maker, you can keep your menu up-to-date whether you offer seasonal menu items or need to adjust prices. Because many diners often view your online menu before dining at your restaurant in person — especially if you operate a food truck with an ever-changing menu, for example — it’s important that the menu is current and accurate. Don’t forget you can share links to your online menu on your social platforms with captivating copy and enticing food photos to help drive clicks to your digital menu, too.

Occasionally, an online menu exists to showcase what customers can expect when they dine with you, but for the most part online menus help facilitate takeout orders — which really took off during the early stages of the pandemic.

Ideally, your POS should allow online ordering and integrations with delivery tech partners like DoorDash, GrubHub and others so guests can get your delicious chicken tinga straight to their doorstep with accuracy and speed.

Make the most of your new restaurant menu design

Now that you’ve identified your stars and your dogs, determined the right length for your menu and added eye-catching colors and illustrations to bolster your menu’s memorability, you’ll want a POS that can keep up.

With Heartland, you can perfectly pace dine-in and online orders — even during peak hours — with order balancing, plus you can simplify menu items and pricing updates with cloud-based menus that sync to all locations and online channels and review reports showing today’s sales compared to other daily, monthly and annual numbers.

That’s not all. A mobile POS from Heartland Restaurant, which can take orders and payments tableside, can enhance the customer experience while increasing average tickets and reducing kitchen mistakes, promoting a natural rhythm to kitchen production and allowing guests to tip directly on the device. When it’s easier for your staff to serve your guests, it’s easier for customers to enjoy their experience — and convince them to come back for seconds.

Get a 360° view of your business with Heartland Restaurant POS and make the most of your menu, and check out The Entrepreneur’s Studio to hear how restaurateurs like you built an empire by taking risks and committed to "unreasonable hospitality" to create magical dining experiences.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this document does not, and is not intended to constitute legal advice; instead, all information, content, and materials available are for general informational purposes only. Information provided may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information, and readers of this information should contact their attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter, in the relevant jurisdiction. All liability with respect to actions taken or not taken based on the contents here are hereby expressly disclaimed.

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