Examine your existing menu to decide which meals and dishes are your best sellers in terms of revenues and frequency of ordering. Unless your menu is extremely limited you probably won’t be able to put everything your kitchen is capable of preparing on your picture menu.
Choose a photographer well versed in tabletop and food photography. Expect your food photographer to have equipment necessary to burnish meat with grilling stripes, spray salads with high-gloss additives and prop up hot mashed potatoes with dry ice to create the effect of steam.
Prepare the foods you’ll have photographed the night before the shoot. Bring everything to the studio unplated to take advantage of platters, dishes and unique serving pieces all great food shooters keep on hand. Oversee the arrangement of the food to make certain side dishes match up to menu descriptions.
Make arrangements with the photographer to retouch, embellish and otherwise enhance the images she shot using Photoshop or another image manipulation program. Alternately, assign the job of retouching the food images to whomever you’ve hired to lay out your picture menu.
Request soft proofs after the first picture menu layout is complete, making certain there is room to drop a minimal amount of copy beneath each photo. Sign off on the next set of proofs only if all of the changes you have requested are done to your satisfaction.
Ask the designer to send the digital file to your designated printer via an upload or take the menu art to the printer on CD so the picture menu can be preflighted in preparation for the printing press. Attend the press run or have the designer attend to make certain everything comes off press with colors, registration and images intact. Get more life from your picture menus by having them laminated.