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Food and beverage menus

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Food and beverage menus

Menus are the part of an event that gets retyped the most: once into the BEO for the kitchen, again into the client's confirmation, and a third time into the printed card on the table. 1pm gives you a menu library instead. Build each menu once as a set of courses and dishes, then use it everywhere: on the BEO, on the confirmation, on the charges, and as an actual printed menu a guest could read.

This article covers building a menu, attaching it to an event, and printing it as a real customer-facing menu.

Building a menu

Open Menus in the sidebar and add a menu. A menu is a set of courses, and each course holds dishes (a name, an optional short description, and a price where it has one). Build the menu up course by course, and reorder courses and dishes by dragging them into the order they are served.

How you price it depends on the menu:

  • Prix-fixe: give the whole menu a set price per head. When you drop it onto an event, the quantity prefills from the event's pax, so a set menu for 80 covers prices itself.
  • A la carte: leave the menu unpriced and price the individual dishes instead, so each line carries its own figure.

Tag dishes with dietary options (vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, and the rest). The abbreviations carry through onto the printed menu and the BEO, so the kitchen and the floor can see at a glance which dishes suit which guests.

Finished with a menu for now? Archive it rather than deleting it for good, and restore it later when that function comes round again. Your seasonal menus stay in the library between events.

Putting a menu on an event

Attach a saved menu to an event and it does three jobs at once:

  • it prints on the BEO, so the kitchen and the floor work from the same list,
  • it shows on the client confirmation, so the client approves the exact menu they are getting, and
  • its pricing drops onto the event's charges in a click, ready to flow through to the quote or invoice.

Build the menu once, and the kitchen brief, the client's document, and the billing all read from it.

Printing it as a real menu

The Print button in the Menus header (and the Menus report under Reports) turns your menus into something you would actually hand a guest, not a spreadsheet dump. It lays out as a proper customer-facing menu:

  • your logo blended cleanly onto the page,
  • live font pickers for the menu name, the course headings, and the dishes, so it matches your house style,
  • dietary abbreviations sized down with a spelt-out legend, printed in full black so they survive a photocopy, and
  • a layout tuned to sit around twenty dishes to a page.

Print it to A4 or Letter, or copy the whole menu as text or CSV to drop into your own design tool when you want the final card laid out elsewhere. Caterers and pop-up restaurants in particular get a genuine printed menu out of the same data that runs the kitchen.

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