How to design a restaurant menu that sells
To design a restaurant menu, first sort your dishes by how popular and how profitable they are. Then order the sections the way people eat, keep each section short, write descriptions only where they help, set prices without currency signs, place your best dishes where the eye lands first, and pick a size and layout that fit how the menu will be read.
1. Start with your numbers, not the layout
Every design decision later on depends on knowing which dishes you want guests to order. Pull three months of sales and the cost of every dish, and put each one in one of four groups. This is menu engineering, the method Michael Kasavana and Donald Smith published in 1982, and it is still the most useful hour a restaurant owner can spend before touching a design.
| Group | Sells | Profit per plate | What to do on the menu |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | Well | High | Give them the best positions and a highlight |
| Plowhorses | Well | Low | Keep them, but don’t promote them; review the cost |
| Puzzles | Poorly | High | Move them up, rename them, give them a description |
| Dogs | Poorly | Low | Take them off |
Not sure what a dish should cost the guest? The menu pricing guide has a calculator that works from your ingredient cost and includes UAE VAT.
2. Order the sections the way people eat
Starters, mains, sides, desserts, drinks. It sounds obvious, but menus drift: a new grill section gets added at the end because that is where there was room. For a Levantine or Emirati menu the natural order is cold mezze, hot mezze, grills, mains, then sweets. Guests find things where they expect them, and the kitchen gets orders in a sensible sequence.
3. Keep each section short
Six to eight dishes per section is a good ceiling. Past that, guests stop reading and fall back on whatever they ordered last time. If a section runs to fifteen, split it (grills from the charcoal oven and grills from the tandoor) or cut the dogs from step one.
4. Write descriptions only where they change the decision
Hummus does not need “chickpeas, tahini, lemon”. A dish called Hammour Sayadieh does need a line, because half your guests will not know it is fish on spiced rice with caramelised onions. Keep descriptions to one line, name the ingredient that makes the dish yours (saffron butter, smoked eggplant, Omani lime), and drop words like delicious and mouth-watering, which guests have learned to ignore.
5. Format prices so they do not dominate
Two habits make a menu read as a price list. The first is currency signs on every line. A 2009 Cornell study by Yang, Kimes and Sessarego found diners spent more when prices were written as plain numbers than with a dollar sign. So write 95, not AED 95, and state once at the bottom that prices are in dirhams.
The second is dot leaders running from every dish to a column of prices on the right, which invites guests to read down the price column and pick the cheapest. That layout is right for a long casual menu where people do compare. For a mid-range or upscale menu, put the price at the end of the description or on its own line under the dish instead.
In the UAE the Federal Tax Authority requires displayed prices to include 5% VAT, and showing prices without it can bring a fine. Price every dish VAT-inclusive and say so in the footer.
6. Put your best dishes where the eye lands
Guests look first at the top of each section and at anything visually set apart. Put two stars from step one at the top of their sections, and give one dish per page a highlight: a star, a box, a line of colour. One highlight per page works. Five cancel each other out.
7. Choose a layout that matches how the menu is read
A café menu is read standing up in a few seconds and wants space and a clear price column. A thirty-dish mezze list wants structure, such as dishes in cards two across. A tasting menu is read course by course and wants everything centred. Pick the structure first and the colours second. The restaurant menu templates are organised by exactly this, and menu design ideas shows fifteen of these layouts side by side.
8. Add Arabic properly
A bilingual menu in Dubai is not the English layout with Arabic squeezed in. Arabic runs right to left, so an Arabic-first menu mirrors the whole page. It needs its own typeface; most Latin display fonts have no Arabic letters at all. And the translations need a native speaker to check them, because machine translation turns dish names into literal nonsense. The guide to Arabic menu design goes through it in detail.
9. Print it at the right size, and test it in the room
Choose the size from how the menu is used: A4 for a dine-in menu, A5 for a café, DL for drinks, a trifold for takeaway. The menu size guide has every format in mm, cm and pixels. Send the printer a PDF with 3 mm bleed and crop marks, ask for a printed proof, then read that proof at a table in your own dining room at dinner-time lighting. Small grey text that looked fine on a laptop often disappears under warm, low light.
Then publish the same menu as a QR code menu, so a price change reaches the tables the moment you make it.
Menu design questions
How many items should a restaurant menu have?
Fewer than most restaurants think. Short sections are faster to read and easier for the kitchen to hold standards on. A common rule of thumb is six to eight dishes per section; past that, guests skim and fall back on the few dishes they already know.
Should prices have a currency sign?
Usually not on each line. A 2009 Cornell study by Yang, Kimes and Sessarego found that diners spent more when prices were written as plain numbers than with a dollar sign or the word dollars. In the UAE, write 95 rather than AED 95 on each dish and state once that prices are in dirhams and include VAT.
Where should the most profitable dishes go?
Where the eye lands first in each section: the top two positions, or a box or a star that sets one dish apart. Do not highlight everything, because a menu where every dish is a special has no specials.
Should a menu in Dubai be in Arabic?
If a meaningful share of your guests read Arabic, yes, and it should be typeset rather than pasted in. Arabic runs right to left, needs its own typeface, and translated dish names should be checked by a native speaker, because machine translation handles menu vocabulary badly.
What software is best for designing a menu?
A menu maker built for menus saves the most time over a year, because prices and dishes change and the layout should follow. General design apps give more creative freedom but make every price change a manual layout job. See the free menu maker for how the two approaches compare.
Ready to build it? The free menu maker handles the layout, Arabic and print settings, so you can spend the time on steps one to six.
Design your menu with the structure already done. Paste your dishes and pick a template.