There’s more to ‘writing’ a menu than food

After writing your menu, think about how to really “write” your menu. Your segment and audience determines how much copy—or how many pictures—should go on there.


I have been spending far too much time lately grading “Menu Planning” finals, so I thought I would share the joy with you. If you don’t have a kid in school, you may not be aware that we as a nation have decided that the only skill which matters is test-taking, and that this skill is crucial to success in an adult’s working life. So get out your pencils and get out your menus, and good luck to you. No copying, no texting, no breaks—you should have gone to the bathroom before you started reading.

You needn’t worry that I’m going to ask you stuff from the first five pages of the test. If at this point you don’t know what a market survey is, have never heard of an equipment analysis and can’t fill out a recipe-costing sheet, there are consultants on summer break who can help you. It’s the last three pages that are the killers.
So you’ve got your menu sitting next to you. Let’s pretend I have chosen it for the class to analyze. The first questions are going to have to do with your customer: What is the immediate impression that your menu gives of your restaurant?

Some of this has to do with price point, of course. A customer can make a quick calculation of the total bill and pretty much know what kind of service, décor, and level of kitchen skill she’s paying for. Those broad market categories—QSR, fast-casual, casual, fine dining—reflect price first; the other stuff falls into step behind it.

Another immediate clue comes from the methodology of decision guidance. (Kindly do not steal this phrase from me; I like to have an original stock of corporatese so that I can speak to the natives without ever mentioning low-hanging fruit.) Part of the menu’s job is to ease the job of customer choice. How you help your customers with their decisions tells a lot about your restaurant.

F’rinstance, if you were the proprietor of a restaurant which made a big chunk of its revenue after bar close, I would suggest that you pay the extra freight to put pictures of your food on the menu. A substantial proportion of your clientele will be, if not comatose, at best in a state of temporary illiteracy. Servers working from 11 p.m. to dawn may not quite be the articulate evangelists for your menu that you’d expect 12 hours earlier, so providing both sides with graphics simplifies things. For the customer, it’s point and grunt; for the server, point and click.

Next come the other selling strategies. Is your menu copy appropriate to your price point? The amount of copy used makes a bell curve across the price points: fast food—pictures, little to no copy. Fast casual—still a lot of pictures, perhaps a bit more explanation (think of the more offbeat items at Noodles & Co). The various subfamilies of casual dining require more copy, both to explain and entice, as the price points rise and the seat times lengthen. Now you find abundant sneaky words that pander to what we hope are customers’ current alimentary prejudices: your locally grown, fire-roasted, line-caught macaroni and cheese, for instance.

There was a question at this point: Students were told in a lecture that, nationwide, restaurateurs shoot for a decision time of two to five minutes and construct their menus accordingly. The question: “What is an ideal time range for customers to read the menu and make their decisions?”

“Two to five minutes” was incorrect. The right choice (letter “b” for those of you who take the test next year) was: “This is a stupid question. It’s different for every business.” McDonalds is not La Belle Vie.

And when you do get to fine dining, the need for menu copy thins out again. If a server is getting a $60 tip off my table of two, he’d better know the menu inside and out, and be able to do the selling himself. I’ve seen this carried too far—anyone who has listened to a 10-minute dissertation on today’s two specials will understand my love of vending machines. Conciseness comes with experience, though, and that’s what I’m paying for, along with my truffle-studded mountain oysters.

After the sales tools we get to the more subtle stuff, where the menu analyst dissects your kitchen. Prices will tell us if you’re opening a bag or making a sauce from scratch, but your menu items themselves will tell us about the contents of your dumpster and the freshness of your food. Are there multiple ways to sell your most expensive inventory? Then that inventory is probably pretty fresh. Are your “garbage-can” items attractive, well-constructed and reasonably priced, and do they absorb the unused product from multiple other items? Can you speak Plan B, and does your menu show it?

If you did well on the test, congratulations. If not, well, I have a class full of people who can help.