Menu design is really up to personal preference, but your guests experience should be kept in mind throughout the design process. This will ensure that the goal of boosting sales and customer loyalty can be driven by the menu's easy navigation.
Incorporate suggestions
Incorporating suggestions such as wine and beer pairings for your meals may entice your guests to try something different and perhaps enjoy their meal even more than usual. It may also allow you to offer some deals based on the pairings or drive sales of products with a higher margin. Adding this thoughtful bit of information is a nice touch that can only add to your menu.
Running your drinks lists alongside your food menu may allow you to work the two together in an innovative way that is very easy to navigate. This might allow you to show the full list of drinks whilst also recommending pairings without doubling up.
Think about how your menu cover works physically. A clever way of combining your recommendations and food together would be to stagger them on a concertina menu cover so that when it is half folded you can see the drinks from one angle and the food from the other side and when flat, they are both together.
Make imagery the star of the show
With online shopping, people are more and more accustomed to making purchasing decisions based upon a picture. So why not show a picture of each dish with a brief description next to it? If you take pride in the look of your food (and know a really good food photographer), then this might be an idea for you.
If you are running something more like a tapas or fast food restaurant, you may be able to incorporate symbols rather than actual photographs. Symbols make it really easy to understand and should make your menu even more legible. This might sound peculiar, but a symbol of a burger or a taco should be simple to create and would make it obvious what each item was before even reading the text.
Split it up
If you have a particularly long menu then you might consider splitting it up so that your customer can find what they want with ease. Try to refrain from copying everyone else for the sake of it. If there is a logical way to split everything up then do it that way. Categorise meals by the type of meat or vegetables that are in them, how they are cooked, the cuisine type, or anything else that you might think of. All are logical methods that make it really easy for your customer to hone in on what they fancy.
Incorporate your menu cover in to this by using the folds on a concertina style menu or a PVC menu cover to separate the categories.