The menu is not just a list of dishes; it is a pricing tool

Customers typically hold the menu for an average of 109 seconds before ordering, according to menu consultant Gregg Rapp, as cited by The Wall Street Journal in 2013. During those 109 seconds, your restaurant is either guiding customers or letting them wander. And most restaurants are letting them wander.

Menu is a choice architecture

Choice architecture is a behavioral economics term. It refers to how the arrangement of options influences the decision of the chooser, even if they are not aware of it. Applied to menus: the position of a dish on the page, the font size of the dish name, the way descriptions are written, whether or not there are accompanying images. All of these are signals that guide the buyer's brain before their conscious mind can intervene.

Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) describes two systems of thinking: the fast, instinctive system and the slow, analytical system. When customers sit down, hungry, chatting, with background music playing, most decisions about ordering go through the fast system. A good menu understands this and is designed so that the customer's fast system selects the right dish you want to sell.

First mistake: no price anchor point

Price anchoring is a psychological phenomenon: the first number we see shapes our perception of all subsequent numbers. In the menu, if the most expensive item is 150,000 VND, the 95,000 VND item looks cheap. If there are no items over 100,000 VND, customers will feel that 90,000 VND is a high price.

A common mistake is designing menus with warehouse logic: list every dish, sort by category, and order prices from cheapest to most expensive. This layout leads guests to start in the low-price zone and stop at a mid-range choice. A menu designed to maximize revenue places one or two high-priced dishes first, or in the top right corner of the page, where the eye lands first. Not to sell those dishes, but to redefine what a “normal” price feels like across the whole menu.

William Poundstone in Priceless (2010) describes field experiments at various American restaurants. When a premium item (unusually high-priced) was added to the menu, revenue from second-tier items increased without any other changes. Customers did not choose the premium item, but it elevated their price perception.

Second mistake: no visual hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is a design principle: the reader's eye needs to be guided, not left to find its own way. When all items have the same font size, spacing, and background color, none stand out. Customers have to read each line from start to finish, often choosing based on habit or randomly.

A menu lacking visual hierarchy looks like a price list from a warehouse. It sends an unintentional signal: everything here is the same, choose the cheapest option you know. This is exactly the mistake many restaurants make when designing menus in Word or copying existing templates.

True hierarchy means: the dishes you want to sell more, which are the ones with high profit margins, not just the best-selling ones, are marked with light-colored boxes, separate images, or larger font sizes for the dish names. The number of highlights should not exceed three to four dishes per page. Because when everything is highlighted, nothing stands out.

When you design to make all options look the same, you are not giving customers freedom; you are creating paralysis.

Principle from Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (2004)

Third mistake: describing dishes by ingredients instead of emotions

How dishes are described on a menu directly affects how much people order and how they perceive value. A 2005 study by Brian Wansink, Koert van Ittersum and James Painter, published in Food Quality and Preference, compared two menu versions at the same restaurant. One used neutral names (“Salmon in tomato sauce”), the other used emotional, origin-led language (“Pan-seared Norwegian salmon, Mediterranean herb tomato sauce”). The result: the richer description was ordered more often and diners rated it tastier, even though it was the same dish.

A common mistake in Vietnamese restaurants is describing dishes purely by ingredients: “Beef, carrot, potato, onion.” That is inventory information, not sales language. A good description evokes something instead: how it feels to eat, where the ingredients come from if there is something special, or the occasion that suits the dish. It does not need to be long. Two to three short lines are enough.

An important note: descriptions must accurately reflect the actual dishes served. The gap between menu language and real experience is the source of many negative reviews in the F&B industry.

These three mistakes are related to each other as a system

The absence of price anchors causes customers to undervalue the entire menu. Lack of visual hierarchy makes it unclear which dishes are worth trying. Dry descriptions make customers feel less inclined to spend more. These three points resonate: a menu that makes all three mistakes continuously pulls down the average order value, even if kitchen quality does not change.

Menu design is a business decision that affects every guest who sits down. If a restaurant serves 80 guests a day and the average order value rises by 15,000 VND because the menu guides choices better, the monthly total is not small. And it requires no additional operating cost.

Should start from where

Before redesigning, gather sales data from the last three months and create a two-dimensional list: which dishes sold the most and which had the highest profit margins. The intersection of these two groups is the number one design priority. Then review the positions of those dishes on the current menu: where they are located, whether there are any visual highlights, and whether the descriptions evoke reasons to order.

This work requires understanding business data and design principles at the same time. The two rarely sit in one person, which is why most restaurant menus stop at “good enough” instead of “truly working.”