Common Menu Mishaps to Avoid
Menu Mishaps Happen
Menu mishaps occur even when you have the perfect location, a rock-star staff, and the coolest vibe in town. But more important than all of this is your menu—the true shining star of your restaurant. This crucial piece (or pieces) of paper that could make or break your restaurant business. Today, let’s dive in to the common mistakes restaurateurs make so you can avoid a food fiasco from a menu mishap.
Too Many Menu Options
Variety might be the spice of life, but having too many food options on your menu can often turn overwhelming. It can be crippling when people are faced with a staggering amount of choices. This renders them unable to make a choice at all (and less likely to return to your establishment). Also, let’s face it: We’re busy these days, and our attention spans are shorter than ever. Who wants to read through four pages of entrees to decide which one to eat? It’s for these reasons that shorter menus are becoming more and more popular today. Quality over quantity is a great mantra to keep in mind when creating your restaurant’s menu. Make sure your menu is focused, and you can be certain your patrons will be, thus avoiding a menu mishap.
The Overly Trendy Menu
Food fads also create menu mishaps. We’re all familiar with them (kale, anyone?), and they’re usually fun to try. But when you’ve got a menu that’s overly focused on fads, it can turn customers away from your business. Trends come and go; and when food trends go, so will your customers. Does your menu offers 20 different versions of avocado toast or has an entire section devoted to sriracha? It might be worth reconsidering how much real estate you’re devoting to these fads. On a similar note, a menu that’s too eclectic or has a mish-mash of too many cuisine types is also a turn-off for customers. Your customers may find it difficult to tell just what your restaurant is trying to be.
Being Offline
It’s hard to deny that nearly everything is online now, which should also be true of your restaurant’s menu. One of the first things customers do before heading out to dine is fire up the computer (or phone) to find out what the menu offers. If your restaurant doesn’t have a dedicated website on which you can post your menu, sites like allmenus.com present you with the option to publish it yourself. And don’t forget about mobile! Your online menu needs to be mobile optimized in order to reach the 70% of customers who prefer scoping out their food choices from a smartphone.
An Untrained Staff
Menu mishaps occur when you ask your waitstaff to sell menu items they aren’t familiar with. After all, customers will inevitably have questions about their options, and being met with a blank stare isn’t the best way to guarantee repeat guests. To further enhance guest engagement, it’s also nice when servers can recommend dishes or sides that complement each other. The more a customer adds to their order, the more revenue your restaurant will see. Gordon’s Food Service has a detailed action plan of best practices for familiarizing your staff with your menu. It’s worth a read!
Spelling Errors
This is an easy one to fall prey to—but it’s also the simplest to fix. Any good writer will tell you that one of the most important tools in their arsenal is a good proofreading. Spelling errors on a menu can turn customers off instantly, inviting the thought that if you’re careless enough to spell your own menu items incorrectly, what’s to say you’re not going to treat your recipes with that same lack of attention? After all, it only takes one wrong letter to turn your all-beef burger into an all-beet burger. Out of respect for your patrons, run your menu through a spellchecker, and also have several other people take an in-depth look before sending it off to the printer. Sometimes a second (or third and fourth) set of eyes will catch mistakes you’d been glancing over.
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