Your full menu probably has thirty items. Your menu page should not. Pick the dishes that earn the spot, in order — the rest can live one click deeper.
What you'll be able to do by the end
- Pick 3-12 dishes that represent your menu's center of gravity.
- Order them by what you'd want a first-time diner to read first.
- Type a price for each (or write 'MP' for market price).
Plain language version — the fast read
Pick three to twelve dishes for your menu page. Put the most important one first. Type a price for each. Market price? Write MP. These are not all your dishes — just the ones you want diners to see first.
Why a shortlist, not the whole menu
A diner reading on a phone has thirty seconds. A menu that opens with a 40-item list is a menu nobody reads. The opening should be three to eight dishes — the ones that define what you're known for, what you'd want a regular to try first, what you'd put on the awning if you only had room for one.
The rest of the menu still exists. Deeper on the menu page, in a PDF, written on the host stand chalkboard — fine. But the top of your menu page is editorial work, not transcription work.
Build your menu shortlist
Use the widget below to drag your dishes into order. Use the up/down arrow buttons to reorder; type into each row to set name and price. Start with what your shortlist would be if a regular asked you "what should I get?" — then refine.
Read your shortlist. Does the top dish actually belong at the top? A common mistake is to lead with what's most profitable instead of what's most distinctive. Profitability matters; it's a follow-up question. The lead dish is the one that makes a first-time diner say "I came for that."
If your positioning is fresh+specialist (you placed yourself bottom-left in Lesson 6a), your shortlist should be shorter — 3 to 5 dishes max. Specialist menus signal confidence by leaving things off.
If you're generalist, lean toward 6 to 8 dishes that span your categories — show range deliberately, not accidentally.
Pricing — the realism check
The prices you typed should match the prices a customer pays after tax + tip, plus the prices that work for your food cost. Both halves matter. A price that's beautifully aspirational but loses money on every sale is the fastest way to close a restaurant. A price that's exhausted-cost-plus is the second-fastest way.
If you already know your food costs cold, skip the cross-link below. If "what should this dish cost me?" is a question you've been postponing, Lesson 8 is a good time to open the plate-cost tool in another tab and run a few of your shortlist dishes through it.
The plate-cost loop, if you want it
- Muntin Plate-CostWalks one dish at a time: ingredients, quantities, cost per unit. Suggests a target sell price for your preferred margin.Open plate-cost →
- Muntin Menu EngineeringOnce you've costed several dishes, this groups them by margin and popularity — which to promote, which to retire.Open menu engineering →
The tools are optional. Operators with a strong gut for their numbers can skip them; operators who've been undercharging for years find them clarifying. Either is fine. The bootcamp doesn't require you to do plate-cost math — it requires you to have prices typed in.
Photos come next — but pick now
Lesson 9 (fresh-track) or Lesson 9b (rebuild-track) asks you to plan photos. The shortlist you just made decides which photos matter most: the dishes at the top of your list need photographs first. If you're hiring a photographer (Lesson 9a) or doing your own (Lesson 9b), the top three dishes from this widget are the brief.
So the menu shortlist isn't just for the menu page. It's the seed for everything visual that follows.
Your menu page has a shape.
A three-to-eight-dish ordered shortlist with prices, saved in your browser. The L14 generator renders this onto the menu page; Lesson 9 photos brief reads it; Lesson 12 local-SEO suggests keyword phrases from it.
The discipline of pruning your menu down to a shortlist is what separates restaurants that get talked about from ones that just exist.
Lesson 9 (photos) is the next fork on the track-aware path — 9a for fresh or 9b for rebuild. The Next button above skips to Lesson 10 (shared) because Hours reads your menu shortlist directly and works without photos in between.