Restaurant Menu Design: Are You Ready For Spring?

There is reason to be optimistic in the restaurant industry. According to the National Restaurant Association, 83% of adults say they are not eating on the premises at restaurants as often as they would like–up from 45% pre-pandemic. Baby boomers especially miss eating out, with 90% reporting they would like to dine at restaurants more frequently.

Smart restaurant operators are getting ready for the influx of business to come. As spring turns into summer, the demand for dining out will only increase. If you are like most restaurant operators, the cash flow cannot come soon enough. To take advantage of the increase in traffic, you will need to update your menu. Many of our clients are doing just that.

Here are examples of some of the menus we’ve recently updated for our clients. All of these menus included a strategic price increase, and we recommend you doing that same. Looking at these smart restaurant operators think about your restaurant menu design: are you ready for spring?

Black Bottom Southern Kitchen: Mini Vacation N’Awlins Style

Black Bottom Southern Kitchen is a trendy carryout and delivery hot spot in North Hollywood, California. To help them capture attention and increased sales, HotOperator developed this restaurant menu design promotion that is scheduled to run from now until the end of March. The menu features their Crawfish Boil, with sweet corn on the cob, craft link sausage, and tender red bliss potatoes.

Charred Oak Whiskey Grill

The Charred Oak Whiskey Grill is a new restaurant in the heart of some of the best whiskey distilleries in the world. HotOperator developed this menu back in December for their soft open, and just delivered the final menus this week for their official opening. The restaurant menu design features steaks, sandwiches, seafood and of course, a lot of Kentucky Whiskey.

Del Rancho Menu Boards

Del Rancho is a limited service chain of restaurants near and around Oklahoma City. HotOperator has been working with them on their social media presence and recently completed their new restaurant menu design for their menu boards. The chain is famous locally for their Steak Sandwich Supreme® which is legendary.

Gianni’s New York Pizza

The pizza business is solid during the pandemic, but it is also very competitive. HotOperator created this carryout and dine in restaurant menu design for Gianni’s that helps to differentiate their style of pizza. One cool entree on the menu features a 2021 Alfa Romeo Giulia TI Pizza Party for the ridiculously low price of only $59,119.99.

Jake Hafner’s Restaurant & Tavern

Full service restaurants have taken a hit lately, but Hafner’s realizes they need to stay on top of their brand and menu. We recently took a strategic price hike for them and revamped the look of the restaurant menu design. They are operating at about 50% capacity at the moment, but that is soon to change.

Juan’s Mexican Cafe

Juan’s is a regional chain that has relied on HotOperator for menu advice, new product consulting and design-engineering for many years. We recently helped them convert their restaurant menu design from a trifold to an 11 X 17 laminated menu for easy cleaning.

Ragtime Cafe

When we help a restaurant operator with a restaurant menu design update and they take an overall price bump, we do not recommend a complete menu redesign at the same time. With Ragtime Café, they had been nearly two years between price adjustments, so we kept the design pretty much the same. In this case the design is still contemporary and the appetizers on the front page are working so well we didn’t want to do anything to disrupt sales.

Sawmill Kids Menu

We develop a lot of kids restaurant menu designs for our clients. For The Sawmill Inn, we updated the food descriptions and added new cartoon images. When we develop a kids menu, we sell them for the cost of printing. It’s a bargain and the clients we have absolutely love them. Reach out if you need help getting kids back into your restaurant.

Taps N Tenders Drive Thru Menu Design

Taps N Tender is a casual restaurant in Naperville that was lucky enough to have a drive through window. They had redesigned a bank and turned it into a cool little restaurant. During the pandemic their drive thru sales have really taken off. Like many of our clients, they have added pizza to their restaurant menu design which has done very well for them.

The Cazadero Steakhouse

Like all of our clients in Oregon, The Cazadero Steakhouse is just now opening up at 50% capacity after a long shut-down. Our client wanted to have a fresh, new restaurant menu design to impress her customers and at the same time make people feel comfortable returning to sitting in a restaurant. The design and engineering of this menu will not only get them badly needed income, but it will also offer their local customers a fresh look at the restaurant they love.

The Country House

The Country House Restaurant with two locations has been using a trimmed down version of their menu for nearly a year. As spring approaches and people start going out to dinner more often, we wanted to update their restaurant menu design to offer a more comprehensive menu. This new restaurant menu design is still smaller than the previous version, but offers some of the core menu items that they are famous for.

About HotOperator

HotOperator is a foodservice marketing agency. We love restaurants. We want them to survive. But we can’t do that unless we work together. Hire us to help you romance your restaurant brand.

Mark and Kelly are a marketing team and managing partners of HotOperator. They have been working in the restaurant business since 1989. Contact them through the HotOperator website, or by calling 800-316-3198, or contact Laux here.