How to set out the prices in a menu

The price is the second thing a guest looks for in a menu and the first thing they compare. How it is written changes how it reads — not dramatically, but enough to be worth doing properly.

One caveat before we go on: you will not find “studies show” here. What follows is long-standing practice in the trade, not proven law. Try it and see what happens in your place.

Where the number sits

Straight after the description, not in a column on the right.

The right-hand price column is the oldest layout and the least useful one for the venue. It invites the eye to run down the numbers and pick the smallest before reading what the dish is. A price attached to the end of the description gets read after it.

If you insist on a column, do not join it with leader dots. Dots are rails the eye slides along.

Grouping and anchoring

If the most expensive dish in a section comes first, the rest look reasonable beside it. If it comes last, the guest has already chosen.

This is not manipulation — the most expensive dish is usually also the best thing you make, and it deserves to be seen. The order simply matters.

What to do when prices go up

This is the real pain, and this is where a digital menu has an advantage paper cannot match.

Do not raise everything at once. A ten per cent rise across the board is visible. Spread over a month and by section, less so.

Do not touch the anchors. There are three or four dishes whose price the guest knows by heart: the beer, the coffee, the Shopska. Leave those until last.

Change when you decide, not when the print run ends. A venue with a printed menu waits for the copies to run out, or sticks labels over them. With a phone menu the price changes in seconds — and if the paper menu comes from the same data, the new file for the printer is one button, not a fresh layout.

Lunch menus and happy hour

Separate prices at certain hours are the commonest reason a menu falls out of step. Somebody changes a price in the morning and forgets to put it back.

What works is the price carrying its own hours, rather than a person changing it. In Ceres you set an interval and the price returns on its own — precisely because putting it back is the step that gets skipped.

In short

Price after the description, the number bare, the most expensive one first, and any rise in stages — without touching the three dishes whose prices everybody remembers.