The menu is not just a list of dishes; it is a pricing tool
Three menu design mistakes that cause your restaurant to earn less than it should, even with great food and customers still coming.
A well-designed menu guides customers to choose the right dishes you want to sell, at the prices you want to sell. The three most common mistakes are: no price anchors, lack of visual hierarchy, and describing dishes by ingredients instead of emotions. Fixing these three points does not incur significant reprinting costs, but directly impacts the average order value.
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 that restaurants design menus based on inventory logic: listing all dishes, organized by category, with prices increasing from low to high. This arrangement leads customers to start from the low price range and stop at the average level. A menu designed to optimize revenue will place one or two high-priced items at the top or in the upper right corner of the page, where the eye first looks. This is not to sell those items, but to redefine the "normal" price level for the entire 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
The way dishes are described on the menu directly affects the number of orders and the perceived value. A study by Brian Wansink, Koert van Ittersum, and James Painter published in the journal Food Quality and Preference in 2005 compared two versions of a menu at the same restaurant. One used a neutral name ("Tomato sauce salmon"), while the other used evocative language and origin ("Norwegian salmon pan-seared, Mediterranean herb tomato sauce"). The result: the richer description version was ordered more and rated tastier by customers, even though it was the same dish.
A common mistake in Vietnamese restaurants is describing dishes purely by ingredients: "Beef, carrots, potatoes, onions." This is inventory information, not sales language. Instead, a good description evokes: the feeling when eating, the origin of the ingredients if there is something special, or the appropriate occasion to order that dish. It doesn't 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 customer who sits down. A restaurant serving 80 customers each day, if the average order value increases by 15,000 VND due to better menu guidance, the accumulated figure over the month is significant. And this does not require any additional operational costs.
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 is a job that requires understanding both business data and design principles simultaneously. These two skills rarely reside in the same person, which is why most restaurant menus remain at a "sufficient" level rather than "truly effective."
References
William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (2010). Brian Wansink, Koert van Ittersum, James Painter, "How Descriptive Food Names Bias Sensory Perceptions in Restaurants", Food Quality and Preference (2005). Gregg Rapp, Menu Engineer, quoted in The Wall Street Journal (2013). Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, menu engineering research.
Frequently asked questions
What is menu engineering and can it be applied to small restaurants?
Menu engineering is a method of analyzing each dish along two dimensions: popularity and profit margin. From there, design the position, language, and imagery to steer customers toward the more profitable items. This method can be applied to restaurants with 10 tables or more, not necessarily large chains. The cost of changes mainly involves redesigning the layout and reprinting, which is much lower than the revenue impact if done correctly.
Why shouldn't prices be listed in a straight vertical line on the right side of the menu?
When prices are aligned vertically on the right, the reader's eye automatically scans the price column before reading the dish name, turning food selection into a price comparison problem. Research from Cornell University Food and Brand Lab shows that customers spend less when prices are displayed in a vertical column with clear currency symbols. Instead, prices should be placed immediately after the name or description of the dish, not aligned, and without leading dots.
Do food images in the menu really help sell more?
Yes, but with conditions. Research from Cornell shows that high-quality food images significantly increase orders for those dishes. However, low-quality images or too many images can have the opposite effect, making the restaurant appear cheaper than it actually is. The practical principle: only use images for 3 to 5 key dishes, invest in high-quality photography, and avoid stock images that are not related to the actual dishes you serve.