Menu Design – Winning Customers Into Your Restaurant

The first thing most potential visitors to your restaurant will do, before they even walk in the door, is examine your menu. They’re looking for good food at an affordable price. If you’re to get them to walk through that door, you make the best of this first opportunity to build confidence in the quality of your restaurant.

Menu Descriptions

There are a number of ways a menu can build such confidence in a potential customer. Clearly, your selection of meals, and the way you describe them is a critical element. Instead of a simple menu listing for “Boeuf Bourgignon”, use compelling adjectives to build desire in the customer for your offered meal. Instead, try the following:

Beouf Bourgignon

Seared cubes of select-cut succulent beef served in a marinade of creamed country mushrooms.

Most restaurants worth their salt of course have taken at least some steps in this direction. However, there is much more to you can do to engage your customers and deliver your unique brand experience before they open the door.

Menu Listings

I was recently invited to a restaurant by a friend, and when I sat down to read their menu, I found that it was very difficult to choose a meal. After some thought, I realised that this was due to the cluttered menu design, such that it was hard to parse one meal description from another. This made it very difficult to build a set of options in my head, and to narrow these down to my final choice.

The first lesson I took away from this experience was that while of course it is important to maintain a diverse selections of meals on your menu, you shouldn’t have so many that your customers forget the first options they looked at by the time they reach the last. If you refer to studies of memory from the field of psychology, you’ll find that our short-term memory is effective up to about 7+/-2 items, and is effective at processing chunks of related information. Applying this to menus, you can make your customers more likely to engage with your menu if you group your meals under meaningful headings such as ‘Beef’, ‘Chicken’, ‘Fish’, and ‘Vegetarian’, and offer no more that 8 or 9 options under each heading.

The second lesson I took from my experience with this restaurant’s menu was to exploit design principles effectively to help customers parse your menu. For example, consider the following two excerpts, and decide which is the easier to read.

Boeuf Bourgignon Seared cubes of select-cut succulent beef served in a marinade of creamed country mushrooms.

Beef Stew Braised chunks of tender beef stewed with garden vegetables in a thick, home gravy.

vs.

Boeuf Bourgignon

Seared cubes of select-cut succulent beef served in a marinade of creamed country mushrooms.

Beef Stew

Braised chunks of tender beef stewed with garden vegetables in a thick, home gravy.

The same information is available in both versions, but I’m sure you’ll find that the second view, which employs whitespace to separate the menu items, bold text to emphasise the name of the meal, and a new line and italic text to capture the longer description, is a much clearer presentation of the menu items.

The objective of this article was to offer a basic introduction to menu design to help ensure that you exploit your menu so as to engage restaurant-window-shoppers before the even enter your restaurant. If you found this advice of value, search for our follow-up articles on how to better apply your brand experience to your menu design and on the design of menu cover and wine-list covers.

Organic Food is a Choice You May Want to Consider

Organic food is a choice that you may wish to consider for your family. It is going to taste very similar but it can have some variations when it comes to the appearance of it. What you can feel very good about though is that there aren’t any residues remaining from pesticides out there used to grow food items. When it comes to organic foods from animals they have been raised without the use of medications or hormones so those sources are healthier for you.

If you have information about the way conventional foods are grown then you definitely are going to see the many benefits from those that are organic in nature. The fact that only natural items are used for the planting, care, and harvesting of the food is very important when it comes to organic foods. To get rid of pests and weeds there are people that trap these animals and that pull the weeds. The land used for the planting of the crops is rotated as well so that there is a chance for the soil to get better.

This is a vital part of successful organic food farming due to the fact that the nutrients in the soil are so often depleted during conventional processing methods. You may be wondering what is used for fertilizer for organic foods. The use of compost that comes from leaves, manure, food remains, and other natural items are used to give the soil what it needs for the crops to grow.

Keep in mind that there are many foods out there that contain some form of organic materials but not enough for them to be certified as organic. Those differences are significant so don’t overlook that information. To be certified there must be at least 95% organic material. These guidelines are set by the USDA and they have many evaluations that farmers have to follow on a regular basis in order to keep that certification active.

You may want to consider organic foods in the forms of those that come from animals as well. This includes cuts of meat, cream, yogurt, cheese, and eggs. Organic foods in this form are raised without any medications including antibiotics. They are also raised without hormone injections. Their diet consists of only organic items and that means they aren’t full of harmful products when you consume them. They are also raised in more humane conditions so that is an additional benefit.

There will continue to be more choices out there for organic foods in the future. This is one of the fastest growing areas in the food market today. It is also one that is taking place on a global scale as well. While organic foods may not hold more nutritional value for you they can be better for your overall health. They can also help us to protect the environment. Those are things many people would like to see happen so they continue to buy such products.

It is a personal choice though and one you should consider. Weigh the benefits of it along wit your budget and other factors so that you can be happy with your choice. Organically grown foods aren’t something that you should buy because you feel guilty. For many people the high cost of them prevents them from getting as much organic food as they would like to. As better methods can be implemented for such processing though those costs should start to go down. The long term benefits to our environment will be something to evaluate in a decade down the road too thanks to these farming methods.

Iris – The Business Hotel, Bangalore

At Iris Business hotel, you can unwind in an ambiance of reassurance and traditions while being connected to some of Bangalore’s supreme places of attractions. The IRIS is to be found in Bangalore making it one of the topmost hotels to hang about while in Bangalore. The hotel offers all the facilities that are the basic needs of the visitors to make their stay comfortable.

The basic amenities comprises of air conditioning, bathrobes, hair dryer, LCD with plasma screen and satellite channels, bathtub, mini bar with the fridge, Tea and coffee making facilities. Tourists staying at this Bangalore Hotel can take pleasure in all the hotel facilities such as 24 hour room service, elevator and lift, round the clock coffee shop, laundry service and dry cleaning, conference facilities.Presently it is one of the first-class hotels in Bangalore (Bengaluru), visitors staying at this hotel will find this hotel very convenient because it is close to all the major points of Bangalore and has a very peaceful atmosphere all around.

Guests are welcomed by the highly pleasant,affable and exceptionally professional and competent staff along with the benefit of all the most recent trade and amusement systems, within the rooms and also throughout the hotel. When you just walk out of the IRIS and all that the traveler to Bangalore looks for, is just some distance away. The central business district, the main attractions of the town, the high-streets, the city’s most excellent eating joints and watering holes, the high and sophisticated malls, the multiplexes, the clubs etc. all are very close by. The site also ensures trouble-free admission to the new-fangled economy university grounds around the town.

Experience in Iris

A person would not come across a more perfect and idyllic site for a business hotel in Bangalore. The people who come for business purpose to Bangalore, this particular hotel is very famous with them. From selection of locality to the rooms, suites, amenities, conveniences and way of life, the IRIS is intended for an experience. Step into the IRIS and you are very warmly welcomed by the trained staff showering warmth,that always been the mark of Bangalore. Special kind of sumptuousness and technology that Bangalore has to present has been the part of this particular hotel. At Iris, you can unwind and relax in an ambiance of comfort and culture while are exceedingly close to some of Bangalore’s best places of attraction.