How to write great restaurant menu descriptions

How to write great restaurant menu descriptions

Well planned, analytic, and creative menu descriptions are hugely important if you care about: more revenue, providing a complete, positive customer experience, and repeat patronage.

Those three points are the secret sauces of successful restaurants.

This is my view after teaching for about 20 years in a resort and hotel management program at Selkirk College in Canada, and it’s supported by credible research from numerous sources.

One study by faculty from the University of Illinois achieved a 27% increase in sales by manipulating menu wording to more comprehensively describe items, ingredients, and preparation methods. Get the book at Amazon. $2.99 for eBook.
That is an enormous top-line increase for an industry where such large margin gains can be very difficult to strategize.

Typically, a restaurant has three ways to boost revenue:

·         Raise prices

·         Increase the number of customers through advertising and increase repeat purchases while retaining existing customers

·         Increase the average ticket with add-on selling and upselling. This is what improved menu copy writing can help to do, and it can work very well.

“In a six-week field experiment involving 140 customers, descriptive menu labels…increased sales by 27% and improved attitudes towards the food, attitudes towards the restaurant, and intentions towards repatronage.”

B. Wansink,  J. Painter, K. van Ittersum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  

Three industry veterans, commenting in an Ashbury Press article, “What’s on the Menu,” agree from their experiences:

"Descriptions have a role to play,” says Louie Stavrakis, sales manager at Restaurant Graphics, a firm that has designed menus for some 500 restaurants. “Consumers are sophisticated, so the descriptions have to be detailed enough so they can make a menu decision. The method of preparation is very important.”

"The customer gets a better idea of what a dish is by describing it," said Neil West, owner and chef of Neil's in Brick Township, Neil's menu lists the main ingredients and technique, for example "Shrimp sautéed in sweet butter with Locatelli Cheese, fresh tomato & herbs served over fettuccine."

While more can be better, knowledgeable restaurateurs also advise against being too cute with menu wording if the result fails to provide meaningful information or if it ventures into plain silly. For example “Baddass Bass” doesn’t spur taste buds and may actually detract from an image of a quality restaurant. Gimmicky can be dangerous.

"I try to avoid giving dishes names, because they don't mean anything," said Constantine Papanicolao, owner and chef of the Metuchen Inn in Metuchen, New Jersey. You have to be descriptive, but not so descriptive that people get tired of reading the menu.”

A CBS News special, by travel editor Peter Greenberg, suggests that the description is everything. “Identifying an item as creamy or succulent can increase the likelihood of an order significantly…also, words that are related to geography, such as ‘Iowa’ pork chops or ‘Kansas City’ barbecue … Other factors may be nostalgic words like ‘legendary’ … or brand-related names like ‘Jack Daniels glazed ribs’ …

Descriptor words can do more than determine whether an item is ordered. “Add just two descriptors to an item such as ‘seafood pasta,’ renamed ‘succulent Italian seafood pasta,’ and people will rate their dining experience differently… say food was much more tasty, the restaurant more trendy, and that the chef had more cutting-edge training.”

Greenberg also said menu wording can facilitate higher menu prices.

“People may be willing to pay more - in some cases up to 15 percent more - depending on the item's label. For instance, a customer may be willing to pay $12 for ‘roasted chicken’ but for $14 for ‘tender glazed roasted chicken’."

 

It’s your key communications tool

You can be sure of one thing with your food menu — guests are going to read it! Few other corporate communication tools carry such a guarantee.

Gallup research suggests that the average diner spends 109 seconds on a menu, that’s shy of two minutes, so every second counts.

Once it’s in their hands, you have the opportunity to feed into diner needs and desires. This is known as psychographics in marketing. Some diners simply want a taste experience that’s different from home cooking, while others actually have health concerns that a thoughtful menu can address (fat content, salt, complete ingredient lists that address allergy concerns, etc.).

Needs and desires are very powerful aspects of the human psyche, so if you can do that well, it’s a win-win for everyone.

What you get in this eBook is a system to create excellent menu descriptions. It’s a system proven effective with marketing students for more than a decade.

When people dine out with the intent of it being an entertainment event, they have a number of expectations:

·         Quality food

·         Great service

·         Pleasing ambience

·         Prices commensurate with perceived performance in each of the foregoing

Many restaurant owners and managers do very well at these four points, but many also overlook the importance and value of a great menu that does justice to food ingredients, to methods of preparation, to how various menu items are served, and that covers what menu items can be best paired with in terms of beverages. There are resource links about wines and pairings at the end of the book, even beer pairings that augment and enhance specific food flavors.

Of course explanations for all of this can be handled by serving staff, but that can take a lot of time at a table of eight and every server has several tables, all of which seem to arrive at the same time.

Why not let diners answer their own questions when possible? A good menu provides diners with important information they want, it enhances the outing, and it boosts staff efficiency and productivity.

Just as importantly, a great menu with carefully considered, evocative descriptions can literally make diners’ mouths water in anticipation. If your menu reaches that goal, it becomes part of the entertainment package, and it can actually boost revenues at the same time.

What restaurateur doesn’t want that?

Words make the difference

 

Marinated carrot and crosnes salad

Crosnes are small larva-shaped vegetables, crunchy and not much else, as seen in the photo following. In reality, they do very little in the dish, but on menus, they can do a spectacular job of moving diners to a dish they may not otherwise have tried.

In a word…we’re “sensory” driven

“Sensory: (from Latin: sensorius). Relating to sensation, to the perception of a stimulus and the voyage made by incoming nerve impulses from the sense organs to the nerve centers.”

—MedTerms.com

Do you know that the brain cannot begin to think about anything until there is sensory input? We are 100% sensory-driven animals, meaning if a sense isn’t triggered in some way, our brains simply cannot fire neurons.

Get the eBook at Amazon and Kobo.