Revision Session 3 Menu planning

Dear Students

Thank you for reading my blog. So today session would be on menu planning. I am taking this topic because it's important topic for a restaurant manager and restaurant manager should have the knowledge of menu planning and how it should be incorporated in overall restaurant operations.

In your practical syllabus you have one topic of TABLE D HOTE menu and ALA CARTE MENUS and I thought it would be a wise decision to incorporate menu planning and to understand your menus from this perspective.


MENU PLANNING is one of the most important managerial activities of food and beverage operations executed by a team comprising of general Manager the fnb director and the executive chef of the hotel.
menu planning calls for careful thought on many factors that determine the success of the fnb operations. the menu forms the basis or acts as a guide upon which all the managerial and operational activities of the fmd operations rest on.

The menu planning team must be aware that it is very important to have

Thourough knowledge on dishes of various meals and cousins
Food cost of different dishes
And of course time taken for producing such dishes

I will be explaining these points in brief.

The major points to be considered while planning the menu are

• Competition
• Policy of the establishment
• Customer
• Operational aspect
• Gastronomical standpoint and
• Nutritional aspect

As far as the competition is concerned we can monitor our competition in terms of hours of operation, the cuisine that they are offering menu choices available, type of customers, menu pricing, portion size of the dishes and time taken for service.


While deciding on the policy of the establishment it is imperative for every restaurant operation to focus on return on investment and the right sales mix. One must also focus on the hours of operations like 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and then 12.00 to 3.00 pm and then evening 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. We have to design menus according to the timing of the restaurant.

One must also see the production process of preparing the food, so if you are using a traditional methods or we have a centralized production will also have any impact on planning the menu.

If it's a traditional system of making dishes the menu should be equally distributed to all sections of the kitchen. In India many multi cuisine or stand-alone restaurants face the situation that they have too much emphasis on a particular section of kitchen and then sometimes it results in service delay.

Other factors are Use of Convenience Products.


In the important aspof the customer, we have to focus on the customer's eating habits, the amount they spend on meals and the budget that they have while dining in the restaurant, the time available for eating and of course the age group factor. In terms of customer one must also consider the health considerations while planning the menu.

In the operational aspect one must consider - the area that is available for the restaurant service, the place of consumption which means that the time taken for the food to be served from the kitchen to the restaurant, the skill level of staff, equipment available, ingredients available,number of covers, ease of maintaining consistency are some of the important aspects of operations.

In terms of gastronomic standpoint, there are various important factors to be considered while planning the menu of the restaurant. These are :

• Colour
• Flavour and Aroma
• Kind of Sauces
• Granish
• Mathod of Cooking and
• Main Ingredient to be used 

So I hope that you are able to understand the main factors of MENU PLANNING.