Looking for menu cover ideas for your restaurant might seem unimportant. You have the building, you have the staff, you have the menu items; how hard can it be to design the menu cover?
It might seem like an unimportant detail . You might think that most patrons don’t look at the cover of the menu, because the good stuff is inside. If you think about it though, a good cover can enhance your restaurant’s atmosphere, make your customers want to spend more money, or just help them feel good about the place they have chosen to eat. Of course, a bad design could could leave a negative impression with customers, and they might not want to come back.
When you are looking for menu cover ideas, you might consider consulting a designer or design company. Graphic designers and other design professionals do this kind of work all the time, and they will certainly be able to offer some good suggestions for your establishment. After looking at some menu cover ideas from a professional firm, you might find the cost worth while if you don’t feel creative enough, or you simply don’t have enough time to handle this important task.
If you do decide to do it yourself, there are many ways to approach the design of your menu cover. You could use a picture of your signature dish. You have one, right? This will get your customers thinking about that dish even before they open the menu. If they are thinking about it, they might order it, and you get the satisfaction and profit of selling your best work.
If you don’t have a signature dish, you can rotate pictures of seasonal specials that you run, like turkey in the fall or fruit in the summer. For this you would use a menu with a sleeve in the cover so that you could change the pictures easily.
Another good menu cover idea is to use pictures of drinks. If your establishment sells alcohol, you can use pictures of beer and wine or mixed drinks, and if you don’t serve alcohol you can use pictures of soft drinks instead. Make sure the drinks look attractive, and mix up the colors and sizes a bit to add interest.
Finally, you can use pictures of desserts on your menu cover. A picture of an ice cream sundae or a nice chocolate cake can plant an idea which will lead to more orders at the end of the meal. Just make sure you don’t have pictures of desserts you don’t serve or don’t do well just because they look good. You don’t want disappointed diners telling their friends about the lousy milkshake they got from you, even though the picture looked so delicious.
Whether you use a professional designer or use one or more of the ideas in this article, you can have a first rate menu cover. Just consider carefully, and you will find the best menu cover ideas for your restaurant.
