How To Make a Restaurant Menu (9 Steps)

To make a restaurant menu, you need to: choose your menu types, list every item, group them into categories, price each item against its plate cost, write the descriptions, set colors and fonts, design the layout and format, decide on photos, then proof, print, and publish it online. Most independent restaurants get through all nine in two to three weeks.

The menu is the only marketing asset every guest reads before spending money. According to a consumer survey by US Foods, 83% of American diners check it before they even arrive. So you're building two things at once — the printed menu that shapes the meal at the table, and the online one that decides whether they show up.

Step 1. Choose your menu types

Decide first what formats you'll run. Each serves a different customer need.

Most restaurants run two or three at once. We've cataloged 25 types of restaurant menus if you want the full picture.

Step 2. List every item

Write down everything you'll serve with the plate cost beside it. Each entry needs a name, description, price, ingredients, and allergens.

Apply one filter before anything else: does each ingredient appear in more than one dish? Items built on ingredients used nowhere else generate the waste, and they're the first to cut. Resist listing everything you can cook — in the well-known Iyengar and Lepper study, people were 10x more likely to buy when offered fewer options.

Step 3. Group items into categories

Starters, mains, sides, desserts, drinks — group like with like, in the order people eat. Kids get their own section rather than options scattered through the main list. More on how to organize menu categories.

Once the categories exist, menu engineering tells you which items inside each deserve the best position, sorting dishes by profitability and popularity.

The reason to cap it isn't aesthetics — it's decision speed. More options mean longer deliberation, more questions for servers, and more inventory lines for dishes that may not sell.

Step 4. Price each item

Pricing runs on three numbers:

1. Plate cost — what one portion costs you in ingredients. Weigh everything, including garnish, then add 5–10% for waste.
2. Target food cost percentage — what share of the menu price you want that plate cost to be.
3. Menu price = plate cost ÷ target food cost percentage.

A burger with a $4.00 plate cost at a 30% target prices out at $13.33 — round to $12.95 or $13.95 depending on how your other prices sit.

For the target, the National Restaurant Association's 2025 Restaurant Operations Data Abstract, built on figures from 900+ operators, puts food and non-alcoholic beverage costs at these 2024 medians:

Treat these as a sanity check, not a target — a pizza concept can run near 20% and a steakhouse near 38%, and both work if the rest of the P&L does. To run it across the whole menu, start by calculating your food cost percentage.

Raising prices at an existing restaurant? Tell guests why — a line like "we've adjusted prices to keep sourcing fresh ingredients" defuses most reactions. For anchoring and charm pricing, see restaurant menu pricing strategies.

Step 5. Write the descriptions

• Keep it short. One line is usually enough.
• Lead with the ingredient that sells the dish. Whatever makes it different goes first.
• Note dietary info. Gluten-free, vegan, contains nuts — guests shouldn't have to ask.
• Skip the clichés. "Mouthwatering" and "delicious" tell the guest nothing.

Instead of "Grilled Chicken", try "Herb-Marinated Grilled Chicken Breast with Roasted Garlic Aioli" — or keep the plain name and put the vivid version underneath, which reads cleaner on a crowded page.

Use it sparingly. The 27% lift came from descriptive labels on selected items, not every line; when everything is "hand-crafted", none of it registers. More in our guide to writing menu descriptions.

Step 6. Set colors and fonts

Match your branding and your dining room. Red, yellow, and orange are the appetite colors and suit casual rooms; green reads fresh for plant-forward menus; blue and black read upscale; brown suits comfort food. Pick two or three and stop.

Fonts follow the same discipline:

• One or two, maximum: More and the menu stops looking designed and starts looking assembled.
• Legibility first: Arial, Helvetica, or Verdana are safe. If you squint at it in your own lighting, it's wrong.
• Use weight, not a third font, for emphasis: Bold or italic marks the specials without adding clutter.

Step 7. Design the layout and choose the format

Lay the menu out in the order people eat — one section per course, with a clear break between them. Put the sections you want read first at the top of the page, with the most white space around them.

Set prices into the item line rather than a right-hand column, so guests read the dish before the number, and size the type for your actual lighting, not your screen. Skip currency symbols if you like — that's a design convention, not a proven revenue lever.

Where to put your best-margin items

Most menu advice repeats the "Golden Triangle" — that guests look at the middle of the menu first, then the top right, then the top left.

Sybil Yang's eye-tracking study in the International Journal of Hospitality Management found otherwise: observed scanpaths differed from industry assumptions, and traditional "sweet spots" may not exist at all. Most guests read a menu the way they read a page — sequentially, column by column.

What does hold up is position within a list. Guests remember the first and last items in a section more reliably than the ones buried in the middle, so put a high-margin dish at the top of each category and another at the bottom — and stop rearranging your layout around a triangle that may not be there.

Before you commit, show the draft to two or three servers. They'll answer questions about it fifty times a night and will spot what's confusing faster than you will. For inspiration, browse our 50 restaurant menu design examples.

Step 8. Decide on photos

Photos on a printed menu are a trade-off, not an upgrade. They raise print costs, date the moment you change a garnish, and add nothing to well-known dishes — nobody needs a picture of a cheeseburger. Use two or three for dishes genuinely unfamiliar to your guests, not twenty.

Your online menu is the opposite: photograph everything, because someone ordering from a phone can't ask a server what a dish looks like. Shoot them well — a blurry photo does more damage than none. Our food photography tips cover the basics.

Step 9. Proof, print, and publish

Proofread for spelling, prices, and formatting, and have someone else read it too — you'll skim past your own typos.

What a price change will actually cost you

Printing isn't a one-time cost. It's the reason most restaurants leave prices stale longer than they should.

Based on 4over4's published laminated menu pricing, starting at $57.11 per 50 menus. Design and print lead time are on top.

That's the practical argument for running a digital menu alongside the printed one, not instead of it: the online version updates in seconds and costs nothing to change.

Pick the size after you know your item count, not before — a menu that forces you into 7pt type is the wrong size, not a design problem. On paper, choose a weight heavy enough to survive a shift.

Take your menu online

1. Pick a tool that updates everything from one place — website, app, QR menu, delivery listings. Change a price in four places, and you'll eventually change it in three. That's what menu management software is for.
2. Design for mobile: At Yami Sushi, 95% of orders came from mobile devices — 38% through the branded app, 57% mobile web, 5% desktop. Short category names that don't wrap, prices beside the item rather than in a column, fast-loading photos. Test it standing in your own dining room.
3. Add modifiers and upsells: Portion sizes, swaps, extras — they raise order value and cut the "without onions?" calls. Michelangelo 301 generated $863,166 in direct online orders and saved close to $130,000 in commissions, with 51% of orders through its own branded app.
4. Put it behind a QR code: A QR code menu for your restaurant means specials and sold-out items are always current, and no reprinted inserts. Table tents, windows, takeout bags.
5. Review it every season: Your digital restaurant menu shows what gets viewed but not ordered, and what sells at which hour. Promote what sells, rewrite what stalls, cut what does neither.