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Restaurant Menu · How to / How not to

How to Write a Restaurant Menu (and How Not To)

A menu is a sales document pretending to be a poem, and most read like a thesaurus had a panic attack.

By Cynical SallyIssue Nº 1

Your menu is the only employee that talks to every single guest, never calls in sick, and silently decides whether they order the 9-euro side or the 34-euro main. Most owners treat it like an afterthought printed the night before service. It shows.

This is what you getA real Full Truth, in full
Cynical SallyRestaurant Menu

The Full Truth

on A new bistro's dinner menu

4.1
out of ten
Thirty-one dishes, four fonts, and a 'chef's signature' jus that appears on six of them, which makes it less a signature and more a handwriting problem.
The Investigation
  1. 01

    It is a wall, not a menu

    Critical

    Thirty-one mains across five loose categories means nobody finishes reading and everybody defaults to the burger. Cut to twelve dishes you can execute flawlessly and watch your average ticket climb instead of your waste bin.

  2. 02

    The price column is doing your sabotage for you

    Critical

    Right-aligned euros with dotted leaders turn the page into a cost spreadsheet, so guests pick by number, not by craving. Fold prices into the dish line, drop the symbol, and let the food sell first.

  3. 03

    Every dish brags, so none of them do

    Notable

    When 'artisanal', 'house-made', and 'signature' appear on nearly every line, the words stop meaning anything and start meaning nothing. Reserve the boasts for the two dishes that earned them and let the rest stand on plain nouns.

The Copy Clinic

Pan-Seared Artisanal Free-Range Chicken Supreme with a Medley of Seasonal Locally-Sourced Vegetables and Chef's Signature Jus ............ €24,00

Roast chicken, charred leeks, lemon-thyme jus 24

'Mom's Famous' Homestyle Beef Lasagna (A Customer Favorite!) ............ €19,50

Beef lasagna, slow-braised shin, 24-hour ragu 19

The Action Plan
  1. 1Cut the menu from 31 dishes to 12: keep what sells and what you can plate perfectly on a Saturday rush, kill the rest.
  2. 2Kill the price column. Remove the euro symbols and dotted leaders, and set each price quietly at the end of its description.
  3. 3Audit the adjectives: allow yourself ten boast-words across the whole menu, then spend them only where the sourcing or technique is genuinely true.
  4. 4Add one anchor dish priced 40 percent above everything else, and place your highest-margin main directly beneath it so it reads as the sensible choice.
Yours for the price of a coffee.Printed with disdain
Your turn

That was a stranger's restaurant menu. Drop yours, I will go just as hard.

One coffee, from €2,99. No mercy.

A menu is not a list of food. It is a guided tour, an argument, and a pricing strategy wearing a nice font. Done well, it sells the dishes you make money on and quietly buries the ones you don't. Done badly, it makes a hungry person feel stupid, and a stupid-feeling person orders the chicken and never comes back.

How to do it right
  • 01Organize by how people actually decide, not by your kitchen's stations. Snacks, starters, mains, sweet. A guest scans for a journey, not a spreadsheet of your prep line.
  • 02Anchor with one deliberately expensive item so the dish you actually want to sell looks reasonable by comparison. The 48-euro tomahawk exists to sell the 26-euro pork.
  • 03Describe the two or three things that genuinely matter: the hero ingredient, the technique, the provenance. 'Slow-roasted', 'cured in-house', 'from the farm down the road' earn their ink.
  • 04Strip the currency symbols and align prices loosely into the description, not in a tidy right-hand column. A column of numbers turns your menu into a price-comparison exercise.
  • 05Cut the menu by a third. Fewer dishes means fresher stock, faster decisions, and a kitchen that can actually execute every line instead of faking eight of them.
How not to
  • Listing 47 dishes 'so there's something for everyone', which guarantees half of them sit in a freezer and all of them are mediocre.
  • The dotted leader line connecting every dish to its price, like a 1990s phone bill, so the eye reads cost first and food second.
  • Adjective soup: 'pan-seared artisanal hand-crafted locally-sourced farm-fresh free-range' before the word 'egg'. We get it. It's an egg.
  • Quotation marks around 'Mom's' recipe and 'famous' burger. Nothing says homemade like punctuation begging you to believe it.
  • A clip-art chili pepper as the only indication a dish is spicy, next to no allergen info whatsoever, on a laminated sheet last updated when the euro launched.