When you open your own restaurant, one key thing that comes to mind is who is going to be printing for you? The printer & designer tends to become a restaurant owners best friend, needing everything from menus, signs, stationery, websites, loyalty cards and so on.

Lets start with menus – it’s pretty self explanatory, you can’t have a restaurant without menus! Its the number 1 thing on the list to sort out – your customer needs to know what they can eat! The variations are endless for menus that can be printed, you can have them folded, single sided, double sided, trifold. And then there is the finishes you can have, matt lam, gloss lam, or soft touch lam, or you could just choose a specialist paper that you like, kraft paper, uncoated card, coloured card, the choices are extremely vast.

You could even go more luxurious and get them foil blocked, embossed or layered, the choice is yours, and easily helped by the cuisine your restaurant has.

For example, a typical classic British restaurant would more than likely go for something a bit old
school, maybe a conqueror laid paper with a vintage script font, it looks classy and high end.

Or you could be an Indian restaurant, a simple matt lam on a 350gsm, with a stand out font, with
bright colours, letting the menu draw you in to its choices or if you’re not bothered you could get a menu printed on 120gsm in a boring font which highlights the obvious.

After boring you with that we move on to signs, again pretty self explanatory, a sign is a sign, But a sign is very important, its what draws the customer in. It needs to stand out, and make it obvious that you’re an amazing restaurant with amazing menus (read above).

Signs come in many forms, a sign on your building advertising who you are, a menu sign which shows
the food on offer, an a board sign which goes on the pavement to again, advertise who you are to
draw people in.

Typically printed on foamex board so its protected in bad weather conditions, the main sign needs to stand out, its the part of the restaurant which the customer first sees, so it needs to look good. The menu sign can be done in so many ways, you can have it printed on silk and then stored in a window, you could have a light-box material, in which you have lights below the material and it lights the menu up, you could have a wall mount, off the building.

Stationery – Business cards, letterheads, note pads, reservation books, all of these are important for a restaurant.

Website – The main hub. From here the customer can search for you, find you and want to come along and see what the fuss is about. You can control bookings from here, show people pictures from the restaurant, tempt people with your menus, explain your story, and so on. The design aspect of the website is so so important, it needs to impress the customer, and draw them into clicking on the booking form. Pictures play a massive part in this, showing the customer what you’re about. You also
show what deals you have on via the website, and your social media. Again, the offers you put on need to be broadcast to people, the website is a great way of advertising them.

Finally, loyalty cards, not a necessary item, but a great way of keeping the customers coming back for more. Usually printed on a 400gsm card, with matt lam, protecting the card so it lasts long, which is quite a good idea as I doubt the customer would complete a loyalty card within a week, it needs to be long lasting.