menu brochures for restaurants!

[genik]

Im looking for ideas on making a menu brochure/catalogue for a Restaurant!
Does anyone have anything in mind?
Or even perhaps any books for restaurant brochures?

[budafist]

Things to consider:

Budget - find out how much the client is willing to spend for the whole budget and per piece.
Food style - this can influence the style of the menu. Example a Japanese restaurant might use Japanese bookbinding techniques.
Customer style - is it a casual family restaurant? Upmarket. Menu design to reflect this.
Try to make the menu into as few pages as possible. It is better to have 1 sheet that opens out into several panels than to have a book with many pages. Why? Because people like me like to read the menu and then compare my top few choices. When I'm flicking through a 6 page document, it's a pain in the ass.
You can put the lunch menu on another menu. Same with dessert and same with drinks. This way having 4 menus means that the customer isn't overwhelmed with too much text and can concentrate on the task at hand. Wait staff only give out the relevant menu. I've found that when lunch, dinner and dessert menu is in 1 book, people take much longer to decide on what to order because they often don't read the headers and skim through the whole thing. I'm sure the restaurant staff will thank you for cutting down the time it takes for people to order.
Don't make the final result too heavy. The waitstaff will thank you for it. I once had to redesign a menu - the previous menu had a metal backing so that it was like a clipboard. The suckers weighed about 1kg each. So when the poor waitress needs to serve a table of 10 people, she's carrying 10kg to the table worth of menus. Not good.
The text needs to be dark text on light background. People don't want to have to find their glasses to read the menu, so if at all possible, make the text a decent size.
Consider the lighting of the restaurant. I have designed a menu for a place that was very dark and lit by candles. All their old menus had text too small and so people would hold the menu right by the candles and therefore the menus had to be replaced all the time because they were being burned by the candles!
Larger font for dish names and smaller font for dish description. It makes skimming much easier as the reader only has to skim the large type.
Find out how often the restaurant change their menu (that includes just changing prices). If it's every few months, then it is a good idea to figure a way of binding that is easy to take out pages or find a way to print the whole thing cheaply. You don't want to make an expensive menu that costs about $20 per piece when it's going in the bin in a few months. Also find out how many menus the client needs. Make sure they get spares because menus will need replacing.
Laminate. Diners have dirty fingers and paper will not last. Um....that's all I can think of at 1.36am on Saturday morning.
Can you tell I have a passion for menus? Must have something to do with how much I love food :)

[budafist]

Hey, you changed your question...

[genik]

budafist, im sorry for the change but it was done so fast i had no idea one would reply so fast, and u wrote so mutch. But its totally worth the time it took you to write it, very important info anyhow!
Still if you have any info on how to bind a special menu for restaurant (bistro actually) it be very helpfull! im trying to make a special menu as bistros are special restaurants with extra retro style!

[Calligirl]

Thanks for all the tips, Budafist, you're a font of information, excuse the pun!

Can this info be put into a sticky so I can find it again? Very good stuff here...in case the rest of us have a menu to do...

[budafist]

Hmmm...you could always look up "budafist menu wisdom" and it should lead you to this thread. :D

Now for binding, if you plan to do it yourself, your local art store will have screws and tape and anything else you need for binding. Otherwise, look around for some local binders. Next time you go to a restaurant and you like their binding, find out who they used.

One of our clients used these guys (http://www.menu.co.nz/solutions/menu_design.htm) once, beautiful stuff but second time around, they were a little expensive for our needs - they were charging $50NZ (around $40US) per menu folder and the printed sheets needed to be designed and printed at an extra charge on top of that. The client wanted 100 of these menus so our quote to the client would have been almost $100NZ per menu or $10,000 for the lot. We had to find a MUCH cheaper way than that. On the upside, if you go for a bound folder, it is an investment because the pages can be printed cheaply and swapped out when the menu changes.

[Virgo Nightingale]

There are some artsy-craftsy ways of binding a simple menu, if your customer is "crafts-capable" and willing to do some manual labor.

I know I've seen menus that are printed on a fairly heavy but glossy stock (or cheaper but fairly well-laminated paper) that have two eyelets through the spine which has a threaded a thick elastic thread through them...

[genik]

Thanx budafist and Virgo but do you have anything we can see photos of?