Creativity is one of the building blocks of a successful restaurant.
It shows in your branding, your restaurant’s interior design, the food that you serve, the art of plating, and on your menu.
However, menus are oft forgotten, relegated to the back burner during the creative process as something that can be done last. After all, it’s just a list of your dishes and drinks, right?
You can’t be any farther from the truth.
That piece of paper that turns into a yellowish tinge over time is actually one of your most effective marketing channels. In fact, it is the only advertising material that you can be 100% sure that your customers will read.
As such, you need to be sure that your menu introduces you well to your customers, reflecting your brand colors and restaurant theme.
Generic fonts printed on white paper with absolutely no visual appeal at all do not cut it anymore.
If you are looking to overhaul your menu design, here are 10 restaurant menus that you can look at for inspiration:
- For Enden af Gaden
Translated to At The End of The Road, the menu for this Denmark restaurant makes brilliant use of layout and typography to display their Scandinavian-inspired food and drinks.
- Bone Daddy’s
They are hip and they know it. The menu design for Bone Daddy’s—a BBQ restaurant chain situated in various locations in Texas, USA—made use of contemporary fonts mixed with matchbox art design.
- Chinchilla Coffee-House
Located in Sydney, Australia, this breakfast café displays a menu that would make anyone with a heart for everything vintage swoon. The typography and font choice both give a feel of antiquity and a touch of steampunk.
- Eleven Madison Park
Eleven Madison Park, a contemporary restaurant in New York, shows that your menu doesn’t have to be extravagant. It only needs to be in keeping with your brand. The restaurant serves simple courses, served in monochromatic style, hence the minimal yet elegant menu.
- Café Kafka
Mediterranean cuisine has never looked better than when designed on a menu this good.
Café Kafka, a restaurant located in Barcelona, Spain, uses a black and white menu, with beautifully drawn diagrams of ingredients and kitchen utensils. They pride themselves with food served only with the freshest vegetables, fish, and shellfish.
- Aroma
Each page of this menu was designed to elaborately describe each dish to the customers of Aroma—a gastrolounge that serves high-end beer and food in Menorca, Spain. The idea behind this minimalistic concept that focuses on content is to encourage the customer to understand the components of each dish, thereby giving them a better appreciation of what they are about to order.
- 13 Wives
Inspired by 13 women (or so their website says), 13 Wives is a Singapore-based bar specializing in 13 cocktail drinks. Each page of the hand-assembled black book that is their menu details each unique cocktail mix.
- Chevy’s
This Mexican restaurant chain, with various locations in the U.S., serves all your favorite Mexican dishes all laid out in their colorful menu with just a touch of retro. Notice how each page features all things south of the United States’ border.
- Madre Mia!
Madre Mia! is a Latin fusion restaurant in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. They are a combination of a bar and restaurant that serves food within an art gallery. It’s not a surprise then that their menu also reflects their theme, full of iconographic art that truly appeals to the visuals.
- Maaemo
Maaemo is a three-star Michelin restaurant located in Oslo, Norway. Their name is from an old Norse word that means “Mother Earth”, highlighting their cuisine that reflects deep Norwegian tradition. Their menu is minimalistic but unique in its presentation—a folded paper menu that opens up to a list of over 20 courses.
Which of these restaurants inspired you to up the ante of your menu? Show us your new design in the comments below!
