Eat Out Eat Well

Restaurants, Diners, Fast Food

On A Restaurant Menu, Position Is Everything

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Pity the poor chicken cutlet stuck in the middle of the pack! Where a menu item is positioned could be the difference between running out of it at that meal or having it reappear as hash or soup the next day.

People tend to remember the top two items and the one at the bottom of a list. So, the chef or restaurateur will make sure that certain dishes are not randomly placed in those spots. You’ll most likely find the highest profit items at the top and bottom of the menu sections because they sell 25% better than items in the middle.

Tip: Where a menu item is positioned in a list could shout “order me” or “I’m just a complacent placeholder.”

High Profit Margin And Signature Dishes

The high profile real estate on a menu is usually occupied by high-margin items – the ones that make the most money for the restaurant – or the restaurant’s signature dishes, the specialty dishes they can knock out of the park – and are the one’s that keep you coming back for more. Price and cost-margin don’t play major roles with signature dishes because the restaurant is sure they’re so good that you’ll keep coming back and spending money.

High-profit margin items are the dishes that are profitable — like pasta. Even if pasta comes with fancy sauce, meat, or seafood, unless it’s served with something like truffles, it’s usually inexpensive to make. That doesn’t mean it’s not good – it just means that it costs less money to make it so the restaurant ends up making more money on it than on some other menu items that contain ingredients that are more costly or are much more labor intensive to make.

Tip: High profile real estate is probably filled by high-margin items – the ones that make the most money – or signature dishes, specialty dishes that keep you coming back for more.

 

Do you eat out?  This is the fifth article in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.

Please share if you know anyone who wants to Eat Out and Eat Well!

Does The Way You Read A Menu Influence What You Order?

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Not everyone reads the menu the same way.  Actually, reading a menu can be a little like reading a newspaper.  Think about it – where do your eyes go first? Researchers have studied what most of us do and savvy restaurateurs make good use of their findings when they design their menus.

Where Do Restaurants Usually Feature Their Most Profitable Items?

Look at a menu. The most important ideas are at the top right of the front page — the spot where your eyes tend to land first. In a two-page/single-fold menu, the most common type, the top right is where you’ll most likely find the most profitable items or the specials. In a single-page format, where the entire menu is on a single page or card, the area of focus is the top half of the page.

Do You Read Or Scan?

Most people don’t “read” a menu but rather “scan” it with their eyes. It makes sense to put the items the restaurant wants to sell where your eye goes first. “Eye magnets” like colored boxes, large fonts, or icons and symbols help direct your gaze. Bold typefaces grab attention and are designed to steer you to what they want you to order. Well thought out use of eye magnets can increase restaurant sales up to 10%.

 Where Do You Look First?

On a two-page menu, a lot of us often go to the right page, go back and read the left page, and then back to the top right to take another look. By the time most of us get to the middle and bottom of the right page our attention is fading. That ends up being where restaurants put items they don’t mark up or ones they know will sell anyway. For instance, unless you’re in a steakhouse, that’s where you’ll probably find the steak — because those of us who are going to order steak are usually going to order it regardless of where it is on the menu. Items they don’t want to feature — maybe things that don’t make money or stand-bys like burgers or eggs that sell anyway — go below the high profit items or on the back of a three or four page menu.

Tip: You’ll likely find a restaurant’s most profitable items or specials — the things they want you to order — on the top right of the front page of a two-page menu or the top half of the page on a single page menu.

Eye Magnets

Some newer research has shown that some of us may read the menu sequentially – the reason menus start with appetizers, go to entrees, and end with dessert, with soup and salad in between.

Regardless of your menu reading habits – some people scan the dessert choices first to figure out if they’ll start with a “lighter” appetizer and go for a big time dessert – the purpose of “eye magnets” and other attention getting mechanisms is to direct your eye toward what the restaurant is highlighting (some might call it “pushing”).

Tip: “Eye magnets” — like colored boxes, larger fonts, and icons or symbols — are used to help direct your gaze.

 

Do you eat out?  This is the fourth article in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.

Please share if you know anyone who wants to eat out and eat well!

What Kind Of Restaurant Is This?

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You can tell a lot from a restaurant’s menu – not just what you can get to eat, but some other things, too.  It would be kind of weird to have spaghetti and meatballs on the cover of a pancake house restaurant – and it would be kind of gross to have grease stains and tomato sauce on a rumpled sheet of paper that lists the restaurant’s specials.

A Menu Is A Defacto Business Card

A menu acts as the restaurant’s business card and can quickly give you some ideas about its inner workings. A dirty menu might imply a dirty kitchen; a clean and neat menu creates a different impression. Even though the main purpose is to tell you what’s to eat, a secondary objective is to make you forget about money so you make your food and drink selections without thinking about the price.

The way the menu looks should be in sync with the restaurant’s concept and image — the décor, service, food quality, and price range — and give you an idea about what kind of eating experience is in store. A six or eight page plastic coated menu, the kind usually found in diners, doesn’t convey the same dining experience as the two page leather bound menu found in an upscale restaurant.

Tip:

A menu’s design should be in sync with the restaurant’s concept and image — the décor, service, food quality, and price range — and give you an idea about the overall dining experience you can expect.

Disorganized menus might mean a kitchen without a plan. A menu with a huge number of offerings (unless it’s a place like a diner with a big turnover) makes you wonder how fresh the food is – and how it’s being repackaged into different kinds of offerings.  A dirty menu is like a dirty bathroom and should make you  think about the cleanliness of the kitchen and the people working in it!

What are your thoughts?

Do you eat out?  This is the third article in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.

Is What You Order In A Restaurant Really Your Choice?

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Have you ever walked into a restaurant absolutely certain that you know what you want to eat? Then the waiter hands you the menu and asks if you want to hear the specials. All of a sudden your “I’m absolutely certain that this is what I’m going to order” has taken a back seat to the pasta special. Why?

Remember Paul Simon’s song, “Mother and Child Reunion”? According to Simon he “was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It’s chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one.”

Putting aside the popularity of the song, who would think to describe chicken and eggs as a Mother and Child Reunion?

Is What You Order Really Your Choice?

Smart restaurant owners and chefs use creative phrasing and mouthwatering descriptions to describe their food.  They’re using menu psychology to suggestively sell from their menu pages. They use design, placement, and words to direct your attention to key items on their menus so it’s more likely that you’ll notice, remember, and order what they’ve pointed you toward.

Sometimes they highlight their signature dishes, but mostly they want to get you to focus on their high profit margin items — the ones that make them the most money. They aren’t always the most expensive, but they are the most profitable.

There’s nothing wrong with ordering something that’s going to make money for a restaurant, but wouldn’t you like to feel that the selection is purely your choice rather than the restaurant’s?

Menus Target Both Your Stomach And Your Mind

A menu is targeted not just at your stomach, but also to your mind.

Gallup once reported that most people spend an average of 109 seconds reading a menu — a pretty short amount of time. Even if people take longer to really read it — after all, some menus are like encyclopedias — a menu’s design means more than a nice layout. It requires psychology and marketing, too.

It’s in the restaurant’s best interest to really pay attention to its menu – a redesign can improve sales by an average of 2 to 10% — which could mean a significant boost in income.

So, a descriptive phrase like “Mother and Child Reunion” is just one of many ways to influence your choice. The messages are often subliminal, but where menu items are placed, how graphics are used, the way the food and drink choices are described, and even the use of dollar signs — all send you directional signals.

The bottom line is that restaurants hope that their menus — a magical brew of prices; superlative or descriptive words; and varying fonts, sizes, and colors — will play with your brain cells and nudge you toward making the choices they would like you to make.

Do you eat out?  This is the second article in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.

 

Some Good Things To Know About Restaurant Menus

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You’ve finished your restaurant meal and plunk down your cold hard cash or rectangular piece of plastic.  You’re paying for your restaurant meal, but do you feel as though what you ate was what you really wanted?

We often overlook the fact that restaurants are businesses and their income comes from what they sell to you. The money they make needs to cover their costs including the food they purchase, laundry and utility bills, rent, cleaning supplies, salaries, glasses, dishes, and so much more.

The Menu And The Mark-Up

The menu is the restaurant’s calling card and its main selling tool – it’s used to convince you to buy what the restaurant has to sell. The way a menu is arranged and how it looks and is written can make or break a restaurant.

The mark-up on the items on the menu is often between 350 and 400%. If the ingredients for a dish cost $3, the dish will probably end up being priced at about $12 — so dishes made with pricier ingredients will, in most cases, cost more.

But most restaurateurs are savvy and will adjust prices to what customers will pay. Most customers, for instance, won’t plunk down $50 for a 10 ounce steak, so menu items are balanced for profit and loss. A restaurant might lose money on steak by pricing it at a lower mark-up, but then make up for it with the mark-up on popular items with less costly ingredients — like pasta and pizza.

Think About What You Pay For Food In The Supermarket

To put things in perspective, think about how much you pay for food when you go grocery shopping. Pasta and rice cost very little, good steak and sushi grade fish cost a whole lot more. In a game of checks and balances that ultimately is reflected in the prices you see on the menu, good executive chefs monitor and leverage every product that comes through their doors.

Food that isn’t sold during earlier meals gets repurposed (ever wonder about the soup of the day, the stew, or the hash?). Good chefs can make those dishes sound delicious and taste wonderful – while, at the same time, marking them up and putting them on the menu as fabulous specials that sell out.

Do you eat out?  This is the first in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.