Menu Visualizer: Turn a List of Dishes Into a Real Menu

The four things that make a menu readable

• Section it into threes. Small plates, larger plates, sweets. A menu with eight sections is a menu nobody finishes reading.
• One line per dish, twelve to twenty words. Long enough to say something, short enough to scan while hungry.
• Descriptions that name the cooking method and one real ingredient. "Slow-roasted, with lemon and oregano" does more than "delicious".
• Dietary markers as small letters, not sentences. V, VG, GF, DF, N — then a key at the bottom, once.

What to write in the description

The rule that works is: method, then one ingredient that is not in the name, then nothing else. "Charred broccolini with romesco and toasted almonds" tells you how it is cooked, what the sauce is, and that there are nuts on it.

What does not work is adjectives. "Delicious", "succulent", "perfectly cooked" and "our famous" all cost words and communicate nothing. So do origin stories — nobody chooses between two dishes because one has a farm name in it, unless the farm name is the reason to order.

The exception is a dish that sounds alarming. If it is offal, cold, very spicy or arrives in a form people do not expect, say so plainly in the description. That single sentence prevents more complaints than any other piece of menu writing.

Dietary markers: get them right or leave them out

A wrong vegetarian marker is worse than no marker. It is a broken promise to the one customer who was relying on it, and in some jurisdictions it is a food safety problem rather than a typo.

Marker honestly from the name of the dish. A dish called "halloumi with honey" is V and not VG, and the honey also means it is not vegan. A dish called "mushroom risotto" is probably V but is only GF if the stock is, which you cannot tell from the name — so leave GF off unless you know.

The useful discipline is to add markers only to dishes where the answer is unambiguous, and to keep a written allergen matrix in the kitchen for the ones where it is not. The menu carries the easy answers; the kitchen carries the difficult ones.

Layout choices that cost nothing

• Group by how the dish is ordered, not by ingredient. Nobody decides they want "a chicken dish"; they decide they want a starter or a main.
• Put the dish you are known for first in its section. Menus are read top-down and most people order from the top third.
• Keep the type size consistent. Two sizes per section — dish name and description — is enough.
• Leave the price off the description line if you are printing a la carte. A column of prices is easier to skim than prices ragged at the end of variable text.
• Two sections of four dishes reads better than one section of eight. The eye needs a pause.

I have seen a lot of small venue menus that are a word-processed list of dish names in one typeface, printed on paper that curls at the corner. The food is usually better than the menu.

A menu is a layout problem before it is a writing problem. The dishes need grouping, the descriptions need to be short enough to scan, and the eye needs to know where to land. None of that requires a designer, and none of it is happening on a plain list.

This tool takes the dishes you already have and does the layout thinking: sensible sections, a description of about fifteen words per dish, and dietary markers only where they can be justified.