The menu: The focal point of a restaurant. If guests remember one thing, it’s the readability, style and content of your menu. However, creating an effective one takes more work than you might think. For instance, did you know that where you place items has a huge effect on ordering habits? Simply changing a dish’s spot on the page can have a massive impact on your bottom line.
When engineering your menu, consult extensively with your head chef about what you want to offer on it; as long as they understand the vision that you have for your restaurant, together you can create a wonderful assortment of options that emphasizes their skillset and style. Involving them throughout this process ensures that every dish has their special touch to make it unique, and that will make you stand out to customers. However, your input as the owner is also crucial to ensure that the menu aligns with the atmosphere and intended clientele, that the prices match the dishes and that the menu overall adds value to your restaurant.
You should have already spoken to your community when you were scouting for a location and thus understand how other restaurants in the area operate and how they designed their own menus. Thus, when considering your prices, use that knowledge to compare your menu with similar dishes sold by your competitors. Competitive pricing could be the deciding factor somebody uses to choose between you and the place down the street. Of course, you also need to make a profit and make sure that what you charge matches what you offer; consider competitive pricing, but that should not be the only factor you use to evaluate your prices.
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