A menu people can actually order from
Most menus are a list of everything the kitchen can make. A good one is a decision you help the customer make.
The short version
Fewer items, grouped in named sections, with prices aligned and no currency symbols. A menu is read in under a minute by someone who is hungry and slightly impatient.
A menu is not a document. It is a two-minute conversation with someone who is hungry, possibly in a queue, and does not want to feel stupid.
That is why the usual advice about clarity applies twice over here. Everything below comes from the same place: the reader is skimming, and the easier you make the choice, the more often they make one at all.
Fewer things, in named groups
Long menus feel generous and read as exhausting. Faced with forty items, most people order the thing they ordered last time, or the first thing they recognise.
Group what you have into named sections - Coffee, Tea, Kitchen, or Starters, Mains, Puddings - and keep each section short enough to take in at a glance. Six or seven lines per section is comfortable. Twelve is a wall.
The sections matter more than the total. A menu of thirty items in five clear groups reads faster than a menu of fifteen in one undifferentiated column.
How to set prices out
This is where most printed menus go wrong, and the fixes are small.
- Drop the currency symbol. If the whole menu is in one currency, the symbol on every line is noise. “3.20” reads as a price; “£3.20” reads as a cost.
- Align the prices in a column, or run a fine dotted leader from the item to the price. A price floating right after the description makes the reader hunt for it.
- Do not sort by price. Sorting cheapest-first teaches people to read the left column and stop; sorting most expensive first reads as pushy. Sort by what it is.
- Keep the prices the same size as the item. Prices in bold, or larger, make the whole menu feel like a price list.
Try this now
Print your menu, hold it at arm's length and squint. If the first thing your eye lands on is a column of numbers, the prices are shouting. If it lands on section headings, you are fine.
Descriptions, where they earn their place
Not everything needs one. “Flat white” needs no explanation and adding one wastes the space that something unfamiliar needs.
Write a description when the name alone will not tell someone what arrives, when the dish is the one you actually want to sell, or when it contains something people ask about. Keep it to a line. Two lines of prose under every item turns a menu into a brochure.
Allergens and dietary marks are the exception to brevity - those are not marketing, they are information somebody needs, and burying them costs you a customer who cannot risk guessing.
Printing it, and changing it
Prices change. Suppliers change. The menu you print in March will be wrong by September, and how you print it decides whether that is a small problem or an expensive one.
- Print smaller runs than feel economical. A thousand menus at a better unit price is not a saving if four hundred go in the bin when the coffee price moves.
- Keep the design file, not just the PDF. The file is what makes the next version a ten-minute job.
- Think about where it lives. A menu that sits on a table gets marked; a laminated or heavier stock earns itself back. A takeaway menu going through doors does not.
- Match the website. The same sections in the same order, so someone who checked online and then walked in is not starting again.
That last one is worth the effort. Your online menu is the one most people read first - it is usually the single most-visited page a café's website has.
A few common questions.
How many items should be on a menu?
Fewer than you think, grouped into sections of six or seven. The real limit is what the kitchen can do well at once, but from the customer's side the number that matters is per section, not in total - five clear groups of six read faster than one list of fifteen.
Should prices end in .95 or .00?
For a local business, round prices generally read as more confident and are faster to add up in your head. Prices ending .95 or .99 are a supermarket convention that reads as a discount signal, which may or may not be what you want. Pick one and use it consistently across the whole menu.
Do I need photographs on my menu?
Usually not on the printed menu - photographs date quickly, cost space, and a bad photograph of good food does real damage. They earn their place online, where they can be replaced without a reprint, and on things like a delivery listing where the customer cannot see the counter.
What about a QR code menu?
Useful as an addition, weak as a replacement. A QR menu costs nothing to update, which is genuinely valuable. But it puts a phone between the customer and the table, it is awkward for groups, and it excludes anyone whose phone is flat. Most places are best with both.
