How to design a cocktail menu

Your team, not your guests, sets how long a cocktail menu can be. Every drink on the list is a specA drink's exact recipe: each ingredient and how much of it. each bartender has to learn. Most drinks need a syrup, a juice or a bottle that you keep in stock. A good menu must also work for guests: it lets them choose without asking, and it puts the drinks that earn the most in the spots that sell best. To get there, you make six decisions: the length of the list, its sections, its balance, the descriptions, where each drink sits and how the prices look.

How many drinks should a cocktail menu have?

Two limits set the length. First, start with the drinks your team can make consistently, including during a busy Saturday service. Your best sellers should become second nature, but the written specs should always be available for less familiar drinks and new menu additions. Second, list only drinks that sell often enough to use up their preps before the preps spoil. A prep is anything you make in house before service, such as a syrup, a juice or a pre-batchA cocktail or mix made in a large amount before service, so each drink is faster to serve.. Each time you make a prep, the amount you make is one batch.

You may have read that too many options stop people from choosing. But a large review of studies found that, on average, more options made almost no difference. So a longer list, on its own, is unlikely to stop guests from ordering.

What matters more is that most sales come from a few drinks, while every drink on the list needs work behind the bar. Take a list of 13 cocktails priced at $12 to $16 that sells 9,000 cocktails over 30 nights, or 300 a night.

The three slowest drinks sell 30 a night between them. Yet the Pisco Sour needs egg white, and the Chartreuse Swizzle needs a batch of falernum.

The bar makes nine preps in house, and several of them go into only one drink. The falernum, for example, goes only into the Chartreuse Swizzle. When a prep serves one drink, that drink alone has to use the whole batch before it spoils.

Here is the prep check for the Chartreuse Swizzle. Whether a drink earns enough money is a separate check, in the menu engineering matrix.

The Swizzle sells 5 a night, and each one takes ½ oz (15 ml) of falernum. So the bar uses 2½ oz (75 ml) of falernum a night, and one 1,000 ml batch lasts about 13 nights (1,000 ÷ 75 = 13.3).

Nights a batch lasts = batch size (ml) ÷ (drinks a night × ml of the prep per drink)

Now compare that with how long your falernum keeps: in this example, a house use-by of 7 days. The 1,000 ml batch lasts more than 13 nights, so it spoils first.

But that doesn't mean the Swizzle has to come off the menu. A 500 ml batch would last just under 7 nights (500 ÷ 75 = 6.7). Try making smaller batches, check whether another drink can use the same prep, and compare the work involved with what the Swizzle earns.

If a drink still creates more waste or prep work than it justifies, consider changing or removing it.

How to structure a cocktail menu

Once the list gets long, split it into a few short sections of drinks that belong together. You can group the drinks in two ways:

• By style, for example "Stirred and strong", "Shaken and bright" and "Long and cold".
• By occasion, for example "Before dinner", "With the table" and "After dark".

Style works in a room where guests know their cocktails. Occasion works better in a hotel lobby or a restaurant bar, where many guests don't know the difference between a sour and a stirred drink.

Here are the 13 cocktails sorted by style.

The shaken section has seven drinks, which is a lot for a guest to read through. Split it only where the drinks belong together. The Daiquiri, Paper Plane, Gold Rush, Pisco Sour, Last Word and Mai Tai are all built on citrus, so they make one "Sours" section, even at six drinks. The Espresso Martini is coffee-driven and suits the end of the night, so give it a place of its own, such as an "After dinner" line at the foot of the menu. A slightly longer section is better than a heading that tells guests nothing.

Balance the list by spirit, style, ABV and price

A balanced list gives every guest at a table something to order. To check the balance, count the list in four ways.

In the style count, the Freezer Martini counts as its own style, because it is poured from the freezer. So stirred shows 3 drinks, not 4.

The counts show two gaps: there is no tequila or mezcal drink, and there is no alcohol-free drink. So a guest who isn't drinking alcohol has only soda to choose from. You can fill that second gap with no new prep: make an alcohol-free sour from the lime juice and honey syrup you already have, topped with soda.

Make sure the alcohol-free drink is as considered as the cocktails around it. Give it a proper name, a balanced spec, the same attention to garnish and a price that reflects what goes into it. Guests who aren't drinking alcohol should still have something worth ordering.

Gin is in 4 of the 13 drinks, nearly a third of the list. That is fine if your bar is built around gin on purpose. If it isn't, make your next new drink with another spirit. The free menu engineering worksheet counts a list by spirit and by style for you.

Cocktail and bar menu ideas that work in service

An idea is worth keeping when the drink is quick to make and uses preps you already have.

A drink that is too slow to build to order at 10 p.m. can still go on the list if you make it ahead: batch it, with its dilution worked out.

Write descriptions that help a guest choose

Keep each description to one line: the base spirit, two or three ingredients a guest will recognize, and the ABV. For the Paper Plane, that reads:

"Bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, lemon · 17.5%"

A guest who has never had a Paper Plane will still recognize the bourbon, the Aperol and the lemon. And the ABVAlcohol by volume: the percentage of a drink that is pure alcohol. shows that it is lighter than the Old Fashioned at 32.4%.

If you show ABV, calculate it from your house spec and standard dilution, and keep that method the same across the menu. The number is an estimate of the drink as served, not a laboratory measurement. Rounding it may be more useful to guests than implying greater precision.

Add a word about taste when the name tells the guest nothing. "Chartreuse Swizzle" says very little, so add "herbal, lime, crushed ice".

Keep every line about the same length. If one drink gets a long story, the short lines next to it look less important.

Make allergen information easy to find before a guest orders. Mark important ingredients such as the almonds in the Mai Tai's orgeat and the egg white in the Pisco Sour, and make sure the team can answer questions about the full spec and possible cross-contact.

Follow the disclosure rules where your bar operates. A menu symbol can help, but it doesn't replace accurate ingredient records or a conversation with a guest who has an allergy.

Where to put the drinks you want to sell

Where a drink sits on the menu may affect how often guests order it. In a café study, items placed at the beginning or end of a section were ordered more often than those in the middle.

That's worth testing on your own menu, but it doesn't guarantee a particular increase in cocktail sales. Start by giving promising, profitable drinks a more visible position, then check whether orders actually change.

Use the ends for drinks that earn well and could sell more. In the stirred section, the Freezer Martini sells for $16 and costs $2.20, so it leaves $13.80 of gross profitThe menu price of a drink minus what its ingredients cost. a drink ($16 − $2.20). That is the most of the four, so it goes at the top. The Old Fashioned leaves $12.58 ($15 − $2.42), and the Negroni leaves $12.60. So they earn almost the same. But the Old Fashioned sells fewer, so it has more to gain from an end spot. It goes at the bottom.

That leaves the Negroni and the Bijou in the middle. The Bijou leaves $11.10 a drink, the least of the four, and it is one of the three slowest drinks. Don't use the middle to hide a drink you plan to cut: give it a fair chance, or the menu repeats the sales pattern you are trying to understand.

How to price and show prices on a cocktail menu

Give each drink its own price, not one flat price for the whole list. The Daiquiri costs $1.76 to make, and the Bijou costs $3.90. At a flat price of $15, the Daiquiri leaves $13.24 and the Bijou leaves $11.10. So at one price, the Bijou gives the guest more for the money and gives the bar less.

A range of prices, here $12 to $16, also gives the guest an entry price and a top price. Work out each price from the drink's cost and your target pour costThe cost of a drink's ingredients divided by its menu price, as a percentage.. The menu price calculator turns those two numbers into a price you can print.

How you print the price matters far less. One restaurant study printed some prices as bare numbers, like "20". Overall, this made no clear difference to spending. A closer look found that guests who saw bare numbers spent about $5.55 more per bill, but the effect was small.

The evidence doesn't establish that dropping dollar signs will reliably increase spending at a cocktail bar. Choose a format that's easy to read and suits the character of the menu, then use it consistently.

Cocktail menu design for print and QR menus

A QR menu is different from print: the guest scrolls instead of seeing the whole page at once. So put the drinks you most want to sell on the first screen.

Test the QR menu on a phone at the table, using the bar's normal lighting and internet connection. Check that the text is readable without zooming, prices are easy to find and guests can reach the full drinks list without getting lost in menus or filters.

To lay out the menu, use Jery's menu designer: the drinks come in from your costed recipes with their ingredients, ABV and allergens, and you set the prices.

When to change the list

Change part of the list each season, but keep your best sellers. If you replace the six best sellers every few months, you have to retrain the team on the drinks they make most. You also lose the drinks your regulars come back for. Keep the drinks guests return for, and use sales and contribution margin to decide what deserves another season. Start by reviewing the slowest sellers, but don't remove a drink on volume alone. A slower drink may earn well, serve a particular guest or give the menu something it otherwise lacks.

Before the new menu goes out, build and taste each new drink with the team in pre-shift sessions, and write down each spec. Then give a written and practical spec test before the first guest orders one.

Cost each new drink before you price it, because a seasonal ingredient can push its cost well above the cost of the drink it replaces.

Questions

Sources

1. Dayan, E. and Bar-Hillel, M., Nudge to nobesity II: Menu positions influence food orders, Judgment and Decision Making 6(4), 2011, pp. 333 to 342. Study 2 (the café): 15 days per menu, alternating; 55% of an item's orders at the ends of its section against 45% in the middle; only soft drinks significant at category level (pp. 338 to 339). Study 1 (the lab): first and last positions about equal.
2. Yang, S. S., Kimes, S. E. and Sessarego, M. M., $ or Dollars: Effects of Menu-price Formats on Restaurant Checks, Cornell Center for Hospitality Research (2009). Full report: 201 lunch parties; the overall price format effect not significant; the $5.55 numeral-only difference from a linear contrast after controls (pp. 10 and 11).
3. Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R. and Todd, P. M., Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload, Journal of Consumer Research 37(3), 2010, pp. 409 to 425. Figures from the abstract.
4. Day, A., Fauchald, N. and Kaplan, D., Cocktail Codex: Fundamentals, Formulas, Evolutions (Ten Speed Press, 2018). The six root cocktails as listed in the publisher's description; the book itself was not opened.