The menu advertise your restaurant...so what's your take on it?
Food and Beverage gurus will tell you that the restaurant menu has evolved greatly over the years. No doubt it has…in terms of the fantastic array of items today’s diner can choose from. The creative guys at your ad agency will shout out that an attractive menu should depict your restaurant’s personality - be it classy, sophisticated or fun-loving, and how to craft the look of the menu accordingly. Menu engineers will tell you that restaurant menu design is a mix of psychology, art direction, and understanding of your business. How profoundly true. However, just distributing your ‘great-to-read-through’ menu doesn't cut it anymore.
According to a Gallup poll the average diner spends less than two minutes (109 seconds to be exact) to scan a menu. The poll also revealed that people avoided spending time reading menus from front to back: instead they scan them quickly. May explain why some restaurants subsequently trimmed the number of pages on the menu. (TGI Friday for example, initially had a menu with more than 12 pages at one time. It has since been reduced to six pages).
Despite all this, if you looked hard at menus used during Victorian times you’d find not much has changed from the one in the average restaurants today. I am not complaining about there been no photographs now or then. Remember, during Victorian times the technology to reproduce colour photography did not exist. Furthermore, the traditional restaurant wouldn’t want their menus to look like those in a fast food or takeaway restaurant. Admittedly, restaurants that prepare Chinese and/or food from the Far East do have photographs in their menus – which are one way of overcoming the language barrier – where a photograph is worth a thousand words.
Everyone would agree that the menu is a sales tool. Many would also agree that much of how it is used as a sales tool hasn’t changed from its original purpose of one hundred years ago or so. Think about it - you put a restaurant menu into the hands of every guest who visits your business, every time they come in. But, before doing just that, you need to make an impression on customers before they ever set foot in your establishment.
We want people to use the restaurant. One of the best ways to get customers to come in through the door is to post an intriguing menu outside. Hence we display the menu outside the place. In certain countries the law says we have to, and, from a marketing perspective it does make sense. A lesser known yet equally powerful reason is that an outdoor menu display helps you improve table turnover time by reducing ordering time. If customers can see what items are on your menu before they come in, the process of ordering food will be more efficient, and they won’t feel rushed.
The menu advertises the fare available in the restaurant. So, if it is an advertisement, what is the headline? What’s the equivalent of Burger King’s “It takes two hands to hold a whopper”, or Taco Bell’s “Think outside the bun” or something similar to “Have a break. Have a Kit Kat”. Our headline is “MENU” or “Colonial Restaurant”. That’s not a headline. That’s the name of the product.
To compound matters further, we normally position the menu display outside the restaurant at the eye level of a small kid –forcing adults to hunch over. Some put it behind reflective glass to make it even more of a challenge – kind of a ‘Dare to read’ contest.
When menus were still being professionally printed, most of the design effort was spent on the front cover. For the most part menus are generally quite uniform. Food items are traditionally grouped as appetisers, entrees, (sub-headed sometimes under meats, poultry, seafood, etc.), sides and desserts. Everyone plays by the rules – almost everyone.
Some restaurants are thinking way outside the box. Like the ‘Kinship’ in Washington, which thematically groups the dishes together under the categories “craft”, “history”, “ingredients” and “indulgence”. The “Fainting Goat” in the same city describes it somewhat playfully; “nibbles” (snacks), “graze” (vegetable dishes) and “feed” (meat-based dishes).
Looking back and now looking around, have you noticed any changes in how the menu of today is designed and advertised as a sales tool?
That’s food for thought.
Ilzaf Keefahs – writes on hospitality related matters that he is passionate about, and likes to share his views with hoteliers and customers alike. |
|
|
|
