Menu redesign

What gets rebuilt

1. A rebuilt dish mix. What comes off, what stays, what gets developed to replace it, with a costed specification for every new line.
2. Pricing architecture across each section: anchor points, spread, rounding convention and the reasoning behind each price rather than a cost plus formula.
3. Section structure and sequence, built so the dishes carrying your margin are where people actually look.
4. Every description rewritten, because on most menus the wording is doing nothing at all. How the method works.
5. Layout direction for your designer, or a print ready layout if you do not have one.
6. Kitchen trial and sign off. Your team cooks the new lines on your own section and equipment, to the written specification, and signs them off before anything reaches a menu.
7. A floor team briefing sheet, one sentence per dish that staff can actually say out loud.

Pricing is architecture, not a formula

Cost plus pricing, where every dish is marked up to the same gross profit percentage, is the most common pricing method in hospitality and one of the more expensive habits going. Percentage is a ratio. Your bank account takes pounds. Holding every line to seventy percent pushes a menu towards cheap, efficient dishes and penalises the expensive ones that carry the evening.

What gets built instead is a structure. Each section gets an anchor, usually the most expensive dish, which sets the frame everything else is read against. It gets a deliberate spread between its cheapest and dearest lines, because a section where every dish sits within two pounds gives a guest no decision to make and no reason to trade up. And it gets a rounding convention that is applied consistently, so the menu reads as one priced object instead of a list assembled by four people over three years.

The full method, including the VAT step most pricing guides leave out, is in the guide on how to price a menu.

The prices that come out of that are defensible line by line. You will be able to say why a dish sits where it does, which matters when your head chef disagrees with one of them, and one of them usually disagrees.

Where people actually look

A guest spends a little over a minute and a half with your menu before deciding. Widely cited research puts it at around 109 seconds. Gallup In that time they are not reading every line. They are scanning a section, landing on two or three dishes, and choosing between those.

Which dishes they land on is substantially a function of position, and position is one of the few things on a menu you can change on a Tuesday for nothing. A high margin dish sitting ninth in a section of eleven is a problem with a very cheap fix. Moving it is not a trick played on the guest; the dish was always there, and it earns well enough to be worth seeing.

The sequence gets built so the dishes carrying your margin sit where attention already goes, and so each section has a shape: something to anchor against, something obviously good value, and the lines you actually want to sell between them.

Descriptions that earn their space

On most menus the wording is doing nothing. "Pan fried chicken breast, seasonal vegetables" tells a guest nothing they could not guess and gives them no reason to choose it over the dish beneath it.

Descriptive naming has been tested properly. In a controlled field experiment, descriptive menu labels lifted sales of the labelled items by around twenty seven percent against identical dishes with plain names. Wansink, Painter and van Ittersum, Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 2001 That is one study and it is cited here as evidence the wording matters, not as a number you should expect.

Every description gets rewritten: what it is, what makes it worth having, and where the thing came from if that is genuinely interesting. Short enough to read at a glance, accurate enough that the plate matches the promise, because a description that oversells is a complaint waiting at table nine.

The trial is the part that matters

This is where redesigns live or die, and it is the step most often skipped.

New lines are cooked by your team, on your section, with your equipment, to the written specification, during a real service. Not a tasting. A tasting tells you whether a dish is good when one person makes one of them with unlimited time. Service tells you whether a section of three can hold it at half past eight on a Saturday with eleven tickets up, which is the only question that matters.

Dishes fail at this stage, and that is the point of having the stage. A plate that needs two minutes of assembly and a garnish nobody can do consistently under pressure is a dish that will quietly drift away from its specification within a month, taking its plate cost with it. Better to find that in a trial than in a stock take.

Your head chef signs off each line before it reaches a printer. A menu imposed over a head chef does not survive contact with a Saturday, and in practice they spot the operational problem in a proposal before I do.

How it runs

• Week 1. Baseline and analysis. If there is no audit, this is where it happens.
• Weeks 2 to 3. Structure and pricing built, dish gaps identified, development brief agreed with your head chef.
• Weeks 3 to 4. Development. New lines written, costed and specified, then cooked and photographed by your kitchen against the spec.
• Week 5. Copy, layout, floor briefing, sign off.
• Week 17. Twelve weeks after launch, we pull the numbers and compare against the baseline.

That last line is not a formality. The baseline is agreed in writing before anything changes, and the comparison at twelve weeks is run on the same three measures. Twelve weeks is long enough for the novelty of a new menu to wear off and short enough that trading conditions are broadly comparable. If it did not work, that will be visible.

What the fee depends on

Quoted on scope. The number is driven by the size of the menu, the number of sites it has to work across, and how much of the costing already exists. It includes the audit work if you have not already had one, and credits your audit fee if you have.

Timing is agreed at the brief, with the schedule built backwards from your intended relaunch date. The step that sets the length is the kitchen trial, because sign off comes from a real service. If you are relaunching to a date, say so on the first call and the plan is built to it. Group and multi menu projects are quoted on the same basis.

Why a redesign fails

Three ways, in order of how often they happen.

The first is that the kitchen cannot hold it. A menu designed on paper by someone who has not stood on the section produces dishes that work in theory and drift in practice. The trial exists to catch this.

The second is that nobody tells the floor. A menu where the staff cannot describe a dish will sell the dishes staff already understand, which are usually the old ones. Hence the briefing sheet: one sentence per dish, written to be said out loud.

The third is that it is never measured, so nobody knows whether it worked, and the next change is made on opinion again.

It is also not a graphic design job. I will work with your designer or hand you a clean layout, but the value is in the dish mix and the pricing. If what you want is a better looking version of the same menu, you do not need me, and an audit would tell you more for less.

A redesign works one part of the menu at a time. See how it plays out for breakfast menu profitability, starter menu optimisation, lunch menu profitability, main course profitability and dessert menu profitability.

Menu redesign FAQs