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Is your menu helping or hurting your restaurant?

Oct 29, 2012

Is your restaurant’s menu helping or hurting business? Let’s look at the two viewpoints, as customers and as business owners, to better understand this important restaurant topic.

 

Image credit: Flickr by robertpaulyoung

When there’s too many items on menu

When you sit down at a restaurant, the first thing you’re presented is the menu. First, how does it look? Is it just a flimsy piece of folded paper? Or is it neat, laminated and professional? Does it include any nice photos of the restaurants’ dishes? Secondly, is it easy to browse and is it organized? Any guest will tell you that if they have to flip through a number of pages just to choose what they want, they will become easily frustrated. Also, how is the menu written? Is it descriptive enough?

 

All of these items play a huge role in creating an impression on your guests for good or bad. However, in this post, we’re going to focus on the number of items on your menu.

 

What can go wrong?

Your customers come into your restaurant because they are hungry! A menu that has a large amount of items can become daunting for a guest to read through. When they take long to peruse the menu, that in turn means it will be harder for them to make a decision. All this time spent on the menu means they will have to wait even longer for their food to arrive. And we all know that hunger and waiting can be a recipe for disaster.

 

Further, the more complex the menu, the higher the chances that your restaurant kitchen will not always have the ingredients on hand, or that it a chef is not quite experienced (or used to) cooking that particular dish; this can lead to poor quality or longer-than-normal cooking times.

 

As a restaurant operator, you need to respect the concept of simplicity and efficiency; ask your self if your restaurant kitchen staff and equipment can truly handle a large menu.

 

For information on how to re-engineer your restaurant menu for efficiency, contact Synergy Restaurant Consultants at 1-888-861-9212.