Restaurant Menu Printing

Restaurant menu printing

A menu is the hardest-working piece of print a restaurant owns. It is handled by every customer, it gets wet, it carries the prices you actually need to change, and it is doing merchandising work the whole time it is open on the table.

MPress prints menus in New Orleans for restaurants that need them to survive service, and to be reprinted without drama when the prices move.

Making a menu last

Lamination

The usual answer for anything handled at the table. It makes the menu wipeable and effectively waterproof, and it roughly doubles the life of the piece. Matte laminate is easier to read under low restaurant lighting than gloss, which throws glare from candles and spots.

Heavy uncoated stock

For rooms where a laminated menu would feel wrong. It will not survive as long, so it is usually paired with a shorter reprint cycle and treated as a consumable.

Synthetic stock

Tear-proof and genuinely waterproof, for outdoor seating, poolside and anywhere a paper menu dies in a week.

Designing for price changes

Prices move. The cheapest menu to own is one designed so that a price change does not force a full redesign. In practice that means keeping prices out of tightly justified layouts, avoiding designs where a single extra character reflows a column, and printing digitally in shorter runs rather than warehousing a year of menus that go out of date.

Where every location has different prices, that changes per menu in one pass through variable data printing.

Beyond the main menu

• Wine, cocktail and dessert lists, often on a different stock to signal a different course
• Table tents, tent cards and specials inserts for anything that changes daily
• Takeout and delivery menus, printed cheaply because they leave the building
• To-go packaging and food-safe boxes through custom packaging
• Gift cards and gift certificates