How to Design a Fancy Fine Dining Menu

Most of us would connect a fine dining experience with a night out to celebrate a special occasion. With high expectations comes a pressure to create an unforgettable experience from the moment they walk through the front doors to the time they leave. And that starts with the menu.

Fine dining menus normally showcase the chef’s top choices, paired with the best wine to accompany each entrée option. Since so much time is put into creating an exquisite menu palate, it only makes sense that the menu design live up to the food.

This is true of Sweet Melissa, Sanibel Island’s fine dining hot spot helmed by award-winning Chef Melissa Talmadge’s, which relies on a well-designed, streamlined menu to help draw in patrons to their innovative and well thought out list of entrees and small plates.

“While our staff guides patrons in finding the right selections and as to which wine pairings work with each dish, it’s equally important to have a well thought out menu that grabs the patrons attention and entices them to order something new. We also have a special wine and drink menu for our bar guests,” Talmadge said.

What templates, paper size and design works best for fine dining?

In general, fine dining menus tend to be less busy and steer towards a more classic design. Templates including the Fancy Fine Dining Menu provide an elegant restaurant menu landscape with a gray-blue background, finished with an ornate white overlay. Ornate graphics surround the page, invoking images of Victorian-era fine dining. Complete the design with a savory image of a patron fav on the front page, and it’s a preview to what’s sure to be an unparalleled dining experience.

The most important thing to remember when choosing any type of design is that a patron needs to identify the establishment as an upscale eating environment. The right menu can be an important part of that experience. Be sure that the menu emulates the sophistication of the fine dining restaurant’s design and brand. It should be presented in an elegant way and printed on high-quality paper. Always incorporate graphics and tantalizing descriptions about food items. A clever illustration may even cause a guest to try something off the menu out of pure curiosity.

Similar to dine-in menus, fine dining menus come in various sizes to accommodate each restaurant. The standard paper size is 8.5 x 11, but menus also come in 8.5 x 14 and a larger Tabloid 11 x 17.

Quality paper can set your menu apart

The typical dine-in menu comes either in a non- laminated cardstock 12 pt. gloss finish paper or laminated with a 5 mil lamination to provide enhanced durability and easier clean up. Fine dining restaurants normally choose to go with a premium menu paper option like synthetic for their fine dining menu printing needs, which is a premium stock at 14 pt. Not only is this type of paper durable, water and tear resistant, and designed with rounded corners, but it feels and looks more elegant than the typical cardstock paper.