Café menus are shorter than restaurant menus and read far more often per seat. Somebody ordering a flat white does not want to scroll past a starters section.
What works for a café
- Put drinks first. It is what most people are there for.
- Keep descriptions short. A cortado needs three words, not fifteen.
- Photograph the bakery counter, not the coffee. Pastries sell on sight; a flat white photographs like every other flat white.
- Use size variants as separate lines where the price difference is meaningful.
Design
Warm, low-contrast palettes suit cafés better than the high-contrast styles that work for fast food. Several of the templates are built for exactly this, and colours, fonts and layout are all editable afterwards.
The counter code
Cafés have two scan points and they need different treatment. A counter code is read from about a metre back by someone in a queue, so print it larger. A table code is read from close range and can be small — what matters there is that it survives being wiped down.