Victoria House is nestled along a quaint lake community just outside Minneapolis. The restaurant offers lunch and dinner, and the food is white-bread American supper club, with a price point on the high side of just under $30, and on the lower side a burger will set you back about nine bucks. According to sales reports, more than 60 percent of entrée volume came from only 12 items, with walleye selling at a rate nearly twice that of the next highest seller -- the half rack of ribs.

The original menu was probably done by a food distributor or printer, with black type on cream-colored paper. Many restaurant operators rely on their food distributor for their menu, and the distributor is usually willing to do it for free in exchange for a commitment from the operator to buy a larger percentage of groceries from his or her distribution company. And while this may seem like a great way to go, remember, distributors tend to have more expertise selling groceries than making menus. Also, they would prefer to do it for as little cost as possible.

Victoria House Before

The lack of design, and even less engineering on the Victoria menu, was allowing customers to make many critical decisions. Nothing on the menu was highlighted, the prices were not strategic, and the "Pick Two" dinner choice was buried on the bottom of the right-hand page. Couple that with putting the appetizers in the second-best location on the menu, and the old menu was working just as hard against the restaurant as the operator was working to make it a success.

Victoria House Performance by Category

Appetizers. The appetizers sold reasonably well, even though the names and choices were truly stale. Again, walleye was the bestseller, followed closely by chicken strips and wings. To help Victoria House bring more excitement to the category, we changed the names of the items and placed the appetizers on the back page of the menu with the instructions that the servers present the menus with the appetizers up to call attention to them. At the same time, we left the prime location on the inside of the menu for other more profitable items.

Entrées.We spread the entrées from the original menu across three pages of the new menu, making it difficult for restaurant customers to choose between items. The prices were tucked into the paragraphs, which are a good thing, and for the most part the items were strategically priced. Sadly, the best opportunities for financial growth on this menu were in a very poor location. The pasta items took up the best spot on the menu, with the walleye buried in the middle of a paragraph of copy, and the mental anchor point -- the "Pick Two" -- in the lower-right corner. In effect, Victoria House was doing everything possible to make it difficult to make money. Sandwiches. Rather than calling the sandwiches "sandwiches," they called them "From the Grill…," which just made these items appear confusing and hard for newcomer guests to find. On the upside, they were on the back of the menu so they would at least be hard to find at dinner, when the odds are better for selling an entrée. None of the sandwiches are able to do the heavy financial lifting that entrées can do; thus, if it were my restaurant, I wouldn't want them to sell at all outside of lunch.

Salads. There are basically two kinds of salads in a restaurant. The kind that sells as an add-on to an entrée or sandwich, and the kind that sells as an entrée. The distinction at Victoria House was less clear, with many of the salads selling for less than a sandwich, but costing more to make. So aside from two or three items, the rest needed serious work.

Pasta. The pasta offerings on the old menu were really bringing the profit potential down. About the only good thing about the pastas was that nobody was ordering them. We did some significant work on the pasta section, improving the items and their descriptions and taking the prices up significantly.

'Explore the Possibilities'

Tucked into the lower-right corner, buried in a group of entrées, was a novel marketing idea that offered some really interesting possibilities. It's a perfect recession fighter, in fact -- the option to pick any two entrées for $29.99. In our current economy, you have to offer your customers a way to feel like they've gotten a good value, or they just won't come back. The "Explore the Possibilities" option is a perfect way to allow customers to feel like they got a great value and, at the same time, grow the ticket total.

The New Victoria House Menu

To start with, we added some color and a nice design to the cover of the menu. We repositioned the items on the menu with the best items in the best locations -- the entrées on the upper-right side of the menu, the new pasta section on the upper right, the sandwiches down the left page, and we added a nice logo for the combination dinner, "Explore the Possibilities." We wanted the menu to be easy to read, so we used a light blue background that would set the highlights off nicely, while still being light enough for the black type to stand out.

Victoria House After

As I mentioned, the appetizers, soups and salads were put on the back page with instructions for the staff to present the menu with the appetizer section up. I'm not sure they will do that every time, but hopefully more often than not; and when they do, their appetizer sales will go up. Finally, we recommended caféstyle covers, because it has been our experience that local restaurant operators who use them have a higher check average than operators who don't.

Believe It or Not: Mental Anchoring Works

I had a conversation with a longtime customer the other day. He's a very successful restaurant operator, having more than a dozen locations throughout Chicago. In my experience, the more successful the operator, the less advice he is willing to accept.

In this case, I had tried for the thousandth time to introduce this person to the concept of "mental anchoring" with regard to strategic pricing. I think he understood it for the first time, and still he was unwilling to take simple advice that could be worth more money to him than anything else he could do to improve his menu. But I'm not surprised, really. Mental anchoring is a stretch of the imagination, and the longer you're in the restaurant business, the more trouble you, too, will have getting your mind around it. So perhaps, if you are new to the business, I'll convince you of its benefits, and help make you a whole lot more money from the get-go. If you've been at this business for a long time, I hope you'll give me one more chance to make my case.

A number of years ago I came across some research done by American Demographics. And at first blush it seemed more amusing than anything. According to the research, the one time people are most likely to spend the most money at a restaurant is the day they buy their home. The thinking is, "I'm already $300,000 in debt. What's another hundred bucks?" So they order a more expensive food item to celebrate.

In itself, this factoid might not seem impressive or valuable. For one, it's not very often that people buy homes even in good times, not to mention in our current economy. However, when you couple that bit of information with the fact that the hardest item to sell on any menu is the most expensive item, then it becomes relevant. So if the steak and lobster is your highest-priced item, it sells less than many of the other items on the menu. And in many cases, it sells dead last.

Here's the rub, though. It's probably the single item in your restaurant that offers the best plate contribution. "Plate contribution" is the total dollars a given item contributes to your sales. Many restaurant operators get hung up on food cost percentages, and while that's somewhat important, in the big picture, what really matters is increasing your revenue per available plate sold.

Just by offering an arbitrary item on your menu that is more expensive than the currently most expensive item, you will get a substantial lift in sales of the most expensive item on your menu. So if you just take the most expensive item and double the order for twice the money, the single order will suddenly start to sell. And the cool thing for you is the most expensive item on your menu is, in all likelihood, your best potential to increase your profit potential.

On the revised Victoria House menu, I used the center-cut pork Tbone and BBQ ribs to help form the mental anchor. Victoria House had two sizes of ribs to begin with, and they already offered single and double pork chops, so by adding a rack and a half of ribs for $31.99, and triple pork chops for $27.99, we were able to take some of the down-pressure off the higher price points.