6 Ways to Write a Restaurant Menu
“We eat first with our eyes.” Or so goes the old saying, which refers to how food looks on the plate. In a restaurant, though, this takes on a new meaning, because even how a menu is written determines how we’ll approach our order. Think about it: fonts, colors, amount of space between each item, whether or not prices are printed, at what point the menu appears in the meal (some don't show up until afterwards!), how flowery the language is... There are as many menu-writing styles as there are schools of cooking.
With the help of our own BA Foodist, Andrew Knowlton, we've pinned down the industry's top menu trends along with the restaurants that exemplify them. And to better illustrate these styles for you, we asked the chefs, owners, and GMs from these restaurants to re-work our Crispy Baked Chicken Wings as if it were a dish on their own menus.
And now we ask you: Which rendition makes you hungriest?
Erik S. Peterson1/6The Visual Aid: Chez Sardine, NYC
A dish that's circled in the center of a well-designed menu might seem like a special, but for restaurateur Gabriel Stulman, the choice is random. "We use circles and boxes purely because we like the way they look," he said. "Other times we use them to highlight an area of the menu we're excited about. We also use them to highlight dishes that don't exactly fit in the other categories: If something's too big to be an appetizer, or too small to be an entrée, we'll put a circle around it so that we're not forcing it into a category we don't think it belongs to."
Erik S. Peterson2/6The Novella: Pok Pok, NYC & Portland, Oregon
"The menu at Pok Pok is so wordy, it can be overwhelming," says Knowlton. But that's kind of the point, explained chef-owner Andy Ricker. "Thai food isn't well understood by the Western audience," Ricker said, so the menu needs to be detailed enough that customers really know what they're about to order. Dishes are often written with brief histories of their origins.
Erik S. Peterson3/6The MinimaList: Manresa, Los Gatos, California
Sparse and mysterious, these menu descriptions—found at some of the world's most high-minded restaurants—tempt you both with what they reveal and what they don't. Menu clarity is traded for enigmatic lists of one- to two-word ingredients. What has kale, lemon, crispy onion, and salt? Answer: lots of things, and that's the whole idea. As Manresa's chef-owner, David Kinch, explained, keeping the menu open-ended gives chefs greater room for creativity. It also provides a sense of mystery that "gives justice to the dish."
Erik S. Peterson4/6The Shout-Out: Husk, Charleston, S.C., & Nashville
In our farm-to-table era, trout is never just trout—it's Sunburst Farm trout. Same goes with Mepkin Abbey mushrooms and Ambrose Farms spinach. But don't mistake all the name-dropping for snobbery. "It's a way to celebrate and highlight the Southern ingredients," said Husk general manager Dan Latimer. "We feel very strongly about recognizing the people who raise these items, and [the menu] is our opportunity to share that information with the dining public." NYC's ABC Kitchen takes sourcing perhaps too seriously; one entire face of the menu is dedicated to listing the 58 suppliers (or what New York magazine calls "useless information").
Erik S. Peterson5/6The Straight Shooter: chi SPACCA, Los Angeles
Mario Batali, Joe Bastianich, and Nancy Silverton were simply being purists when they came up with the Italian butcher shop concept behind chi SPACCA. According to chef Chad Colby, part of the concept was to keep everything as authentically Italian as they could, down to the language the menus are written in. You'll never find a simple herb-roasted chicken, the name for the dish is "pollo alla diavola," and that's all they're going to say about it on the menu. The lack of detail has a practical side to it, though: "It helps foster interaction between the diner and server," explains Colby, "which prevents ordering mistakes."
Erik S. Peterson6/6The Memento: Alinea, Chicago
At Alinea, the menu arrives at the end of the meal. Restaurateur Nick Kokonas says the idea behind this is simple: you don't want to ruin the surprise element of chef Grant Achatz's concoctions, but you do want to elucidate the logic behind the order of dishes. This makes sense for tasting menu-only restaurants like Alinea, where the experience is about handing over the keys to the kitchen and letting them dazzle you. Your dinner becomes less of a meal and more of a food-based show, and your menu becomes the souvenir.
