How to Layout and Classify your Dishes for Menu Printing

When it comes to menu printing, you always have to know how to arrange your menu items. You can't just list everything in terms of their price, or their first letter. You have to have a good and effective layout that lets people find the type of food that they want quickly. The dishes must be classified in a functional way where people can logically will find what they need. In this article, I will teach you about the proper layout and classification of dishes for menu printing. Hopefully this should be able to help you organize your menus for the benefit of your customers. Arranging by eating order – The first thing that you need to do for your menu layout is to arrange your food and drink by “eating order”. This means that you have to divide them by appetizers or side dishes, main courses, desserts and then drinks. Arranging your food this way simulates the “eating experience” for people as they pick what they want to eat first, their main course, and what they may want for dessert after etc. It makes things more organized in their mind, and it does also help them figure out what foods should they expect first. This is standard practice for most restaurants so do not forget this. Dividing sections by order type – Next, if your restaurant has a lot of different dishes and meal packages, you may want to subdivide your menu items even further by making distinctions of the order type. You can arrange the menu items if they are ordered “a la carte” (where it is ordered as one dish or “according to the menu”) and also you can arrange them if they are ordered as a whole meal package (such as meals with drinks and side dishes). This is useful for most customers since some might want to order packaged meals outright, while others want to “customize” their orders to their specifications. Organizing by food style – Now, if you are a restaurant that has a lot of food types cooked in different ways like Italian, French, Japanese or Chinese, you may want to organize your items by these food styles as well. This helps people match their types of foods, since you don't want to order food that may clash when eaten together. For example you may not want to order Japanese sushi with Italian pasta, or Chinese dumplings with exquisite French desserts. Since some people might not know enough about food to figure out which is from which cuisine style, it should be best to arrange and mark the foods by appropriately so that they know what type of food it is. Classifying by ingredients – Finally, restaurants may arrange their menu items by primary ingredient. By this I mean they will have subsections in their menu that have only listings for beef, pork and chicken dishes. They might also have sections for pasta or noodles, seafood and salads. For some special customers this is convenient, especially the ones with allergies or have certain foods that they want to avoid. So if you have a menu that has a lot of dishes for a certain primary ingredient, you may want to classify them by that as well. So those are a few of the common classification choices that you have for your menu items. You can mix and match these arrangements to work for you. The important thing here is that your menu must be arranged logically so that people can find what they are looking for quickly. If you do this well, you should have no problems with your menu printing.