The art of writing a restaurant menu incorporates more than a nice layout: psychology and marketing both play big roles. While the local mom-and-pop restaurant may not have done a lot of research into how to sell more meals with the right menu design, you better believe that any big chain restaurant invests time and money into creating menus that make your mouth water and your wallet fall open. As a consumer, a little awareness of the strategies menu designers use can help you bypass all the marketing gibberish, letting you focus on getting the best value and the best meal. Here’s five.
- Half-way Down the Page: Depending on the size of the menu, there are hot-spots your eyes naturally fall on. On a one-page menu, the hot-spot is about halfway down the page, for instance. You’ll find two different type of dishes in hot spots — high-margin meals and signature meals. The signature meals are those that the restaurant knows it knocks out of the park — these are the meals that they bet will have you coming back time and again. Price and even cost-margin aren’t major considerations for these dishes because a restaurant owner can usually assume that if he can get you back in the seat time and again, you’ll keep spending money at the restaurant.
- High-Profit Margin Dishes: The second type of dish that is typically highlighted are those particularly profitable for the restaurant, like pasta dishes. Pasta is inexpensive to serve, even with a fancy sauce and meat or seafood. That doesn’t mean the pasta dishes are bad, or even that they’re priced out of line with the rest of the menu. They’re just the dishes with the highest profit margins for a restaurant.
- Hierarchy and Organization: Most menus are organized along the lines of how a meal might be served — appetizers, salads, entrees, and so on. But within that traditional hierarchy, a menu designer has a lot of freedom. Research has shown that readers look at the first and last items in a section. It is useful to look at those items (they’re often signature dishes) and may be the dishes that the owner makes the most money on, but looking deeper into the menu can provide some interesting alternatives.
- Specific Ingredients: Menu writing is meant to make your mouth water, with descriptions of seafood from a specific location or vegetables loaded down with adjectives. There’s a reason for all those descriptors, though. Not only are writers making food sound as appealing as possible , but they’re also providing an introduction for anyone encountering a particular ingredient for the first time. You may not recognize the name of every fish in the ocean, but hearing the location it comes from, even as broadly as the Pacific Ocean, can reassure you that it is at least somewhat familiar.
- Recommended Items: Your waiter will almost always have a recommendation or a special to tell you about — and it can come off as a rehearsed spiel. It can be designed to highlight the same dishes that the menus are meant to promote, but you can also use that spiel as an opportunity to get an honest opinion about what your waiter has tried.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Let’s not forget the special dinner menu! Often times when we go to restaurants they’ll have a separate dinner or lunch menu w/ a cheaper deal! That always grabs my attention. Although actually, it might not be technically cheaper because they always try to throw on additional things like a side of baked potato and yank up the price.
I tend to order the larger food items which usually only cost a dollar or two more. That way I have a yummy lunch the next day.
Bram, you forgot the one item with the biggest margins: alcohol!
Go for “transparent” over red, white, or rose, and you cut the restaurant’s profit even more.
There are many new questions that come to the mind of the parents of a newly born baby like how to handle their babies first cold, how to make babies sleep, what kind of food is good for them till the age of 6-9 months, how to soothe babies teething pain, signs that tell if the baby is ready for the solid food and why the solid food is not good for them in the initial few months and so on.
Seriously you get paid to do this? Not sure where the savings are or even where a tip is that a 12 year old that has eaten out wouldn’t be able to find.
Oh right I never would have thought to ask the waiter…
I never really thought about the psychology that goes into a menu. I know how important the design is though (I watch a ton of restaurant reality shows….) I’ll have to be more aware if I’m more prone to a specific area of the menu, and whether or not these dishes are priced higher or are specialties of the restaurant. I agree with one of your readers though, I love ordering off the special menu because I know these dishes might not be around the next time I come in to eat.
These are not ‘tips’. I could have gone to about.com for this information.