15 Hidden Tricks In A Restaurant Menu

What is so special about a restaurant menu that it deserves an article, you may ask? But did you know restaurant menus are full of sneaky tricks to help you make certain favorable decisions?

Yes! You read that right.

Restaurants do not just design their menu anymore. They engineer it.

Restaurant menu engineering is a buzzword in the food and beverage industry.

A lot of profitability rides on a good menu.

Restaurant Menu Engineering

Restaurant menu engineering is emerging as an interdisciplinary field in food science. The job involves creating an absolutely convincing menu to favor the restaurant. Every part like font, design, color, weight is given immense thought and then designed according to the needs of the restaurant. The need here being profitability.

Needless to say, restaurant menu engineering taps into the psychology and visual perception of a customer.

It analyses factors like

• What sells best on the restaurant menu?
• What should sell better?
• How much profit does every sale make?
• Cost-benefit analysis of every food item on the restaurant menu

Restaurant menu engineering is a subtle manipulation to steer the customer towards making favorable purchase decisions.

Classifying restaurant menu items

Every menu item is carefully analysed. Analysis involves maintaining records of purchase costs and labor involved to prepare that dish so that they can estimate the overall cost. Once you know the over-all cost you can fix a mark-up.

It is then classified under four categories based on two factors

• Profitability
• Popularity

And every dish can be placed in one of the following four quadrants

Based on where the restaurant menu item falls in the quadrant, owners can make menu decisions on

• What item to improve or discard?
• Which item is highly profitable?

As you can see in the picture, the stars are the most profitable menu items while the dogs are the least profitable. All this is part of restaurant menu engineering.

Tapping customer psychology

While this is happening on the owners side, how does the restaurant menu on the table work as a tool for the restaurant?

Restaurant menu engineering heavily depends on the visual reception of food of every customer.

A customer does not spend more than 5 to 10 minutess on a menu. Yet it is the single most important tool that the restaurant has to convince customers. Within a short span of time and very little attention span compared to the time a customer spends in a restaurant, a good menu should do the job. And restaurant menu engineering does it successfully.

And here is how it does it!

Hidden tricks on a restaurant menu

1. Appearance

A restaurant menu is one of the key aspects to sell quality of the restaurant. So its appearance should be excellent. When we talk about appearnace, it includes factors such as

• Presentation
• Weight
• Color
• Design

The font should be stylish and rich. It should convey quality of the food that is going to be presented shortly.

A menu’s weight has to be ideal. It cannot be too heavy. So it should be arranged and bound correctly and should be in a size that is comfortable to peruse.

A good restaurant menu design should focus on a neat menu. The menu cannot be cluttered. The design should convey sophistication.

The common colors used on menus are

• Deep brown/Red/Deep Red (For covers)
• Blue, red or orange (inside)

The psychology behind this is for the cover to convey aspects of royalty and the interior to convey a sense of comfort.

Colors like blue or pale green are soothing, while colors like red or orange are known to intiate hunger.

2. The golden corner

The upper right corner space in the menu is the golden space. When you normally pick a menu, you look straight at the upper right corner and then move down or to the other side. The visual perception and the way the customer usually scans a menu is the science behind this golden corner.

3. Detailed Description

Would you rather buy a item called ‘vegetable biryani‘ on the menu or would you rather buy this :

Long grained basmati rice cooked in aromatic spices and fresh vegetables drizzled with ghee, garnished with onion rings. Served with a side of onions and coriander dunked in fresh curd.

The latter, right? The more descriptive it is, the higher price the customer is willing to pay.

This is because that small summary makes you think the food is of better quality.

4. Fancy language

In the above example, words like long-grained aromatic, drizzled, garnished, dunked, fresh are all fancy language.

The purpose of fancy language is to stimulate the customer to react to the dining experience.

Even when you read the description you can imagine the food and its allure. You can’t wait to taste it and you order it!

5. Nostalgia

Food is associated with beautiful childhood memories for all of us. We all have our favorite ‘family dish‘ or a ‘grandmother’s recipe.’ And this is exactly what the restaurant menu engineering wants to capitalize on.

Food invokes emotion.

So the restaurants try to come up with names that will resonate with you, your values and your emotions.

I went to this quirky place called ‘Food Bar’ and there was a ‘Grandmothers Chocolate Cake’ on the menu. I ordered it and then it tasted just like any other cake.

The point is, a vast majority will order it because it resonates strongly with all of us.

6. Cultural Element

When the retaurant menu says ‘biryani’ (I know its repeating, but its my favorite people!!) your interest as a customer is limited.

But when the same menu reads – Kashmiri biryani , Awadhi biryani or Hyderabadi Biryani, you are more prone to buy the food item.

Your mind connects the food to the culture of those places and gives the food a special twist even before you have actually tasted it.

Same works for any food item. Tying a cultural aspect into it makes it more appealing and increases the chances of the food being ordered.

7. Nested pricing

Even today the smaller outlets practice printing their prices parallel to the food item connected by dots. But the modern and sophisticated outlets do not follow this anymore. That old method is an easy way for you as a customer to compare prices of the food items and arrive at a dining decision.

Restaurant menu engineering has effectively put an end to this through a strategy called nested pricing.

In nested pricing, the price comes immediately after the description of the food item thereby allowing no room for comparison.

8. No currency symbol

Whenever you see a menu, normally the price is written as Rs.100 or Rs.325. Today popular outlets have ditched the currency symbol. The prices on their restaurant menu is printed simply as numbers – 100 or 325.

This does not remind the customer that he is spending money every time he sees the price.

9. Expensive item first

Many restaurant menus follow this. The trick is to print the most expensive item at the top. And then follow that price with lesser priced items. So when the customer scans the menu and sees the lesser priced items, he feels it is reasonably priced compared to the most expensive one at the top.

10. Category

Restaurants today do not offer more than seven items per category. That is seen as the limit where the customer can choose the food fast with minimal confusion.

The more the choices, the more the delay in deciding what to eat.

If the restaurants want to add more food items, they create a separate category and add items.

11. Marking up the second best

Nobody walks into a restaurant and readily orders the most expensive beverage, say wine on the restaurant menu. So what these restaurants cleverly do is, in comparison, the customer is more likely to order the second best or third best wine.

So the restaurants mark up these wines for higher profitability because these are the ones that actually sell.

The topmost one is mostly for show.

12. Food Photos

This one is tricky. Too many photos will make the menu look cheap.

Capturing appetizing food photo is an art. That is why there is such a huge demand for food photography. These photographers use a lot of behind-the-scene-tricks to make the photos dazzling.

One such dazzling photo per menu page will make the menu look classy. Not all restaurants prefer to have photos though. There is an inherent risk (What if the photo looks different from what appears on the table?) but restaurants seem to be willing to take that risk.

Also such photos are a sure fire way of making the customer spend more by raising expectations about the food even before it is served.

13. Negative space

A good restaurant menu will never be cluttered. Restaurant use a lot of negative space in their menu for two purposes

• Easy to choose food
• Highly appealing

But the negative or blank space is strategically placed so that it does not seem too obvious to the customer.

14. Highlights

Have you seen certain menu items that are highlighted on a menu. You probably did not realise they were highlights but here are some sommon ways:

• Put the food name in a box
• Bold font
• Highly stylized font very different from the rest on the menu.
• Different symbols near a food item.(Eg: Chilly symbol for Spicy foods)

These are some ways in which the menu tries to catch the customers eye. The customer thinks it is special and orders it mostly. These could be highly profitable food items or new items that the restaurants want the customer to try.

15. Chef’s Recommendation

This is a definitive way of convincing the customer that this is exactly the food he should order from the menu. You might have seen this at many high end restaurants. This is another subtle nudge to you to choose that particular item.

Now you know all the hidden tricks, be wise the next time you visit a restaurant. But don’t let that stop you from enjoying some great food people. If its worth it, its worth it!