Menu Cover

If you are opening a restaurant, bar, or café, you will need to find bar menu covers that will attract your customers. There’s a great number of menu sleeve options available for restaurant owners, but which menu covers should you choose?

Many businesses will want to employ a clear bar menu cover. With these types of covers, the menu itself can be printed out from a computer or professionally printed. Once the paper is slid into the clear plastic sleeve, it is insulated from smudging and ripping. The downside to the clear menu cover option is that frequent spillage can make a clear sleeve appear sticky and worn down quickly. With the large amounts of drinks being served at a bar, liquid easily can mark up the menu covers, more so than at a traditional restaurant. A laminated or hard cover will protect the menu from liquid, but you still must remember your clientele. The more formal hard cover menus should reflect your atmosphere. A casual restaurant can have tons of flare, animation, etc on the cover, but this will look garish in a more expensive bar. A photo of favorite foods or drinks from the bar printed onto the bar menu sleeve may be a nice touch. For a more upscale bar, a simple bound cover with a solid color cover displays work the best. Certain atmospheres may call for a leather menu sleeve or even something totally unique like wood sleeves.

A compact one page covered menu is a perfect solution for a limited bar menu. Your clientele will easily be able to see what is available at the bar with this format. Opening up a large booklet can be uncomfortable in the bar area if there isn‘t a lot of space between stools. If you do happen to have an expansive menu, a double sided menu will work well. You can slip a single or double sheet of your menu into a menu holder that is bound by sewn fabric. This maximizes your space so that the customer simply needs to flip over his or her menu for additional choices, rather than leafing though a larger menu. If you use this option, you may want to use one side for food and one for drink, that way the customer can always look at the menu they want.

Bar menus that slip into a plastic cover held by a base are generally a poor idea. Menus should be portable for the customer and this type of bar menu holder is often difficult to handle. It does, however, provide the convenience of not taking up much space so it should not be completely discounted.

It’s important not to get bogged down by the myriad of menu sleeve choices available to you. The most important thing is that your menu covers appropriately covey the atmosphere of your establishment and that the menu is easy for customers to handle. Other considerations for bar menu covers are purely aesthetic and should be left to personal preference.