Restaurant menus: format, lamination and allergens

A menu is the one printed thing a customer holds while sitting at a laid table, and that space is tighter than it looks on a screen.

• Portrait A4 — the standard: it sits next to a plate, reads without spreading your arms, fits a menu holder. It carries twenty to thirty dishes comfortably.
• A4 in two columns or folded — when there are many courses or the menu is bilingual: a second column avoids printing two separate menus.
• A3 folded in half — it gives space and makes an impression, but on a table for two it takes half the surface. It suits restaurants with large tables, not a trattoria or a bar.
• Hardcover — the menu that stays with the venue for years, with replaceable inner pages. A different kind of investment: it costs more and signals a level.

A test that takes a minute and almost nobody does: print a full-size draft and put it on a table in your own venue, with a plate and a glass on it. Half of all format decisions change after that test.

And a note on the wine list: keeping it separate from the food menu is nearly always better. It updates on a different schedule, a different person at the table reads it, and a single over-thick menu never gets opened to the end.

Declaring allergens is a legal obligation for anyone serving food, and it covers fourteen substances identified by the European regulation (EU 1169/2011): among them cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, peanuts, soybeans, milk, nuts, celery, mustard, sesame, sulphur dioxide and sulphites, lupin and molluscs.

On a printed menu the solution that works best is the simplest: a symbol or code beside each dish, plus a clearly visible key — not at the foot in 5 pt, but where someone looking will find it. Alternatively a line referring to a consultable document, which must genuinely exist and be up to date: that line alone, without the document behind it, is not enough.

⚠️ What each dish contains is known by the venue, not the printer. We print what you give us: the per-dish allergen list must be prepared — and kept current when a recipe or a supplier changes — by whoever cooks. If you are unsure how to word it, check with your adviser before printing the run.

Two practical points:

• Repeat the key on every page carrying dishes, not just the first. Someone opening the menu halfway will not go back to look for it.
• Symbols must stay legible after reduction: if they are clear in the file but print as dots, the information is there but not accessible — and you may as well not have included it.

This is the tip that saves more than any other, and it must come before layout, because afterwards it cannot be recovered.

Prices change — by season, by ingredient cost, because a dish leaves the menu. If the price is set inside the artwork, every adjustment means a full reprint. If the menu is designed to change, you change one page.

Three ways, from simplest to most structured:

1. A separate price page. Dishes and descriptions on one side, the priced list on another: only the second gets reprinted.
2. A hardcover menu with replaceable inner pages. The cover stays with the venue for years, the inner pages change as needed. The most elegant solution for anyone changing the menu every season.
3. The daily insert. An A5 sheet printed in the morning — catch of the day, specials, the chef's suggestions — slipped into the fixed menu. It costs very little and takes pressure off the main menu.

On quantities: we print from 50 to 1,000 copies. For a venue the temptation is to order plenty because the unit cost falls; but if the menu changes in autumn, fifty extra copies in March are fifty copies to bin. Two considered runs beat one large mistaken one.

One last thing: if you need two languages, consider a single page in two columns rather than two separate menus. It costs less, updates once, and the foreign guest does not have to ask for the menu "in English" — one small friction removed at the start of the evening.