Things To Consider Before Finalizing Your Restaurant’s Menu
Opening a restaurant is that the perfect opportunity to put your creative skills to the test. You’ll be able to play with uncounted ideas while setting up your restaurant. From food to furnishings to interiors, everything about your restaurant is made unique if you permit your creative juices to flow. The most interesting but difficult phase comes once you are deciding the theme for your restaurant. As a restaurant owner, you need to understand that your restaurant theme goes beyond a carefully chosen location and a well-designed menu.
Finalizing the theme
Remember that your restaurant is a business, and the theme will create a unique stamp of it in the market. If you’re obtaining stuck while selecting a theme for your restaurant, here are a few things to consider
1. Your audience
Before plunging into your restaurant theme, you would like to ask yourself- who am I serving? Families? Men? Women and kids? Blue-collar or white-collar professionals? Always remember that what appeals to one consumer group may not appeal to the other group. You need to identify and understand your audience properly before finalizing a theme. Your menu ordering, working hours, interior decor and seating capacity depends largely on the kind of audience you are targeting.
2. The opinion of your focus groups
Ideas for a brand new restaurant concept in all probability keep sound like popcorns in your head. You’ll be thinking of a family-style restaurant, a cafe or a food truck around the corner of the street. But focus groups are the most important thought to make. More often than not, your own bias stands in the way of a good restaurant concept. You need to ask yourself- will my audience like whatever I’m offering? Try to go for a theme that’s not very common in your region and will be liked by your audience. Take the opinion of your focus groups while finalizing your menu ordering restaurant theme.
3. Seasonal Menus for a boost
As a society, we are moving towards being a lot of health-conscious. We are eating healthy & eating organic. How can you use this for your advantage, you ask? You design a concise menu with few items that are only available seasonally.
If you’re taking the example of Naturals ice cream, you’ll notice that their seasonal mango ice cream is a big hit among its target audience and if we go local, we’ll notice that we eagerly wait for sugarcane juice every summer! This example must have taken you on an unhappy trip! Enough to get the point the purpose
Bring that seasonal punch to your menu and quirk it up with the names “winter warmer menu” & “Chef’s summer coolers” Your customers will eagerly wait for it all!
4. Your competition
You cannot open a sandwich shop if you see there’s already an established brand providing that. It’s not impossible but difficult. You may need to spend a lot on marketing to establish your USP. But while selecting a theme, you must know what your competitors are doing. Nobody is asking you to repeat their style. But you can still get inspired by their themes and add your own twist to them. The theme of your competitor’s restaurant is probably one of the most important factors to think about because it greatly determines how many people would come to your restaurant. So never underestimate the ability of your competitors.
5. Make Digital Menus
What is a Digital Menu?
A Digital menu is your restaurant’s customizable menu card on a screen. But I think the additional important aspect when we point out the Digital menu is “How do you make one?”
When you print over a menu card or a poster, there’s room for colours not to pop as much as you expected them to. Being in the business of making cravings; colours help in a significant way. a slight mishap can drop your numbers. A digital menu ordering will help to set the right expectations of however your food can look. And you’ll add many photos! Let people read with their taste buds, not eyes!
Tools to assist you to create a Digital Menu. There’s a great tool called Viewed that helps you create a digital menu without much problem. Once you’re shifting from a traditional menu to a digital menu, you should keep in mind to follow a design language. View lets you pick a theme from the beginning to create an appealing design for your Digital Menu.
At CloudMenu, our partners help you manage your digital menu cards so you don’t miss out on catering to those who wish to go for a contactless dine-in.
6. The location, design, and equipment
Where does one want to set up your restaurant? Somewhere close to the centre of the town or a bit towards the outskirts? What kind of design do you want? Sophisticated and classy or stark and uniquely conventional? These are questions you would like to answer whereas choosing a theme for your restaurant. If you’re planning on an upscale restaurant, you certainly don’t wish to locate it in an average neighbourhood. the kind of cooking equipment you would like also determines the theme of your restaurant by creating it as transparent as a food truck or as reserved as a fine dining restaurant. Always remember these factors because they also confirm your budget.