Have you thought about how are the best restaurants menus created?

We are discussing about restaurants menus from all perspectives:
– Design
– Font
– Content
– Prices
– Materials
To make it simpler, let’s combine all these in 2 big categories – Design and Materials.
DesignWhat includes the design of the menu restaurant?
Pretty much everything, right?
Layout, logo (branding), pictures, fonts, colors, and even the used materials if we are talking about printed menus.
For sure you held in your hands menus that you love, but also menus that weren’t great.
A great restaurant menu, no matter if it is a digital one or a printed piece of paper, it has to be engaging, to make your customers interested to take a close look, and to be smartly created.
Let’s take one by one and enter a bit into details.
EngagingBy engaging I mean that the menu should have awesome food pictures for example.
But if you include food pictures, be 150% sure that your food will look exactly as in the pictures.
When you have food pictures in your menu, you create expectations.
Make your customers interestedYour menu can make your customers interested by using a nice design, cool fonts that are simple to read, large fonts that attract your attention, and colors.
This is not a simple task and you should work with experienced menu designers to find the best solution.
Smartly created menusAfter a while, you will know perfectly which are the favorite food of your customers.
When you have this information, you will have to create a new menu and put the most popular food and drinks in such a way so your customers know what made your restaurant popular.
You can even include food pictures just for the most popular dishes your restaurant makes.
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Now getting back to the overall design, pay huge attention how you combine all these elements and what fonts you use.
Here are 6 fonts that work great in restaurants menus:
Be sure that you use the right font size, you want your menu to be easily read.
Also be sure to use maximum 1-2 fonts, one for the headings, and one for the paragraphs.
And regarding menu templates, it is a great idea to use them if you are just starting with your restaurant or if you don’t want to invest the money to work with a professional designer.
MaterialsThe feel of your restaurant menu is as important as the design.
Of course, this applies just for printed menus.
Nowadays, many restaurant menus are digital and can be read using a tablet or a smartphone.
As you probably observed, many restaurants use the most basic materials for their menus.
Most restaurants use just a thin plastic-coated paper when they should actually use leather, glossy high weight paper, cardboard, and other materials.
ConclusionsCreating restaurants menus is not complicated but you have to study a bit the industry and your competition, and of course to make many tests.
Making tests is a great way to try new ideas but absolutely always track the results of these tests, otherwise it is just lost time.
So, to get started, you should first have ready all the content that your menu will include.
Then you have 3 options:
1. Get a restaurant menu template and put your content on.
2. Hire a professional designer.
3. Start designing the restaurant menu by editing a template or by starting from scratch.
Don’t rush the process, no matter which path you choose to go on.
I'm a programmer at heart. But in my 20s, I realized there was more to the world of fonts than just Courier.
Driven by endless curiosity, I built a system to explore them.
That project grew into one of the world’s leading font identifier platforms: www.WhatFontIs.com.
By 2024, WhatFontIs is helping nearly one million designers—famous or not—discover the names of the fonts they need.




