The menu is copy, and it is read by someone hungry.

Think about the last time you sat down at a cafe. You read the menu, all of it, probably twice. Very little else a business writes gets read that closely. The reader is about to pay, they want to get it right, and there is nothing else to look at until the food arrives.

Most menus are still typed by the owner the night before they go to the printer, copied from the list the kitchen works off. That list was written for the cooks. The menu is read by everyone else.

Sort it the way people choose

Kitchens group dishes by where they are made: hot beverages, cold beverages, continental, Indian, Chinese. Customers decide by situation. Something quick before a meeting. Something to share between four. Something sweet. Something the child who eats only plain things will touch.

Sections that match those situations get read faster, and the reader finds their dish before they get bored and order what they had last time. A chai house can sort by the hour, morning, afternoon, late. One of the three working menus we built for Nom Nom, our QR ordering project, does exactly that, for an invented chai house called Ritu. You can open it on the Self-published page.

Fewer dishes, described better

A long menu hands the work to the reader. Past a certain length a section stops being read and starts being scanned for something familiar, and the familiar thing is usually the cheapest. You already know which dishes nobody orders, because the bills tell you. Take them off, and spend the space on the ones that sell.

Say what arrives at the table

“Garden Fresh Delight” could be a salad, a sandwich or a mocktail. A dish name can be fun, but the line under it has to be plain. What it is, how big it is, how it comes. “Paneer tikka sandwich. Grilled, with mint chutney, cut into four. Enough for one hungry person or two curious ones.” The reader can picture it, and knows whether to order a second.

In Gujarat, a few questions decide most orders, and the waiter answers them all day. How spicy is it? Is there egg in it? Can you make it Jain? Is it enough for two? Put the answers on the page, next to the dish, and not in a footnote marked with an asterisk.

A good menu answers the questions the waiter gets asked: what's in it, how big is it, how spicy, and can you make it Jain.

Then cross out the adjectives. Delicious, mouth-watering, freshly prepared, signature. Every dish on every menu claims them, so they say nothing. One real detail does more than three of them: where the coffee is roasted, that the bread is baked in the morning, that the thali changes on Thursdays. Only if it is true. Our piece on writing a product description works the same way for things that ship in a box.

Prices without the small print

Put the price where the eye lands after the description, in the same size as everything else. If extras cost money, say how much: “Add cheese ₹40” is clearer than “cheese available”, and nobody argues about the bill. If GST or a service charge goes on top, say so at the top of the menu. A customer who finds it on the bill remembers the surprise longer than the food.

Write the dish the way it is said

An English menu in an Ahmedabad cafe still has customers who order in Gujarati. Keep the dish names as people say them. Nobody asking for vagharelo rotli wants it called “tempered flatbread”, and the translation makes it sound like something the kitchen has never made. Write the name as it is spoken and describe it underneath, in whichever language the rest of the menu uses. Our piece on Gujarati or English covers how to choose that.

The QR menu is still a menu

Many cafes now put a QR code on the table that opens a PDF of the printed menu, which then refuses to zoom. On a phone the reader sees a few lines at a time, so the section names and the first words of each description carry far more weight than on paper. Short section names. The useful words first. Prices visible without pinching the screen. If a customer has to scroll past twenty dishes to reach the desserts, put a list of sections at the top they can tap.

Do this before the next print run

Take the menu to a table and read it as a stranger who has never eaten there. Cross out every adjective. Next to each dish, write the question your staff hear most about it, then answer that question in the description. Remove the dishes the bills say nobody orders. Move any extra charges to the top. Then hand it to a friend, ask them to order, and watch where they stop to ask. Each of those pauses is a line still to write.