Marketing Restaurants

How To “Halloween-ize” Your Restaurant’s Menu

Halloween is just a couple of weeks away! All over Canada, youngsters are gearing up for the spooky celebration – and so should you! As a restaurant owner, it’s wise to continually come up with methods of enticing your customers to visit your place of business. The Halloween season offers you some unique ways to promote your eatery. Have some fun with it!

Let’s take a look at how you can “Halloween-ize” your restaurant’s menu in order to elicit more orders.

Turn your menu into a graveyard scene.

Sounds weird, doesn’t it? But this is the time of year when creepy decor is very popular. In addition to decorating your restaurant with all things black and orange, consider revamping your menu as well. This is an especially good idea for your restaurant’s website since you won’t have to worry about printing costs. On Penji.co, Karen Garces offers up a great idea for a burger joint’s new graveyard menu.

“You can put a caricature of a dead man’s hand holding a burger,” she suggests, “Then you can put your restaurant’s name or logo on the gravestone for consistency. While this design is only suitable for fast-casual restaurants or fast-food chains, it might not fit into the audience of fine dining restaurants.”

Give spooky nicknames to some menu favourites.

It’s a super simple, yet effective technique. Re-name some of your menu’s most popular (or not so popular, for that matter) items. It is great way to welcome fans of Halloween to your restaurant. In fact, you will encourage customers of all kinds to check out what’s “new” at your eatery. A couple of years ago, Popeyes came up with a clever idea. Samantha Leffler of Us Weekly highlights the popular Louisiana-based fast food chicken restaurant’s “Voodoo Tenders”.

“The Voodoo tenders meal comes with three crispy chicken fingers drizzled in sweet garlic chili Voodoo sauce and sprinkled with green onions, making for a very spicy menu item that will leave diners with breath that could wake the dead,” she describes, “Customers will also be given a choice of a signature side and a buttermilk biscuit.”

Design a jack-o’-lantern menu.

Is there an image more closely associated with Halloween than the good old jack-o’-lantern? Carving pumpkins and turning them into either spooky or funny caricatures is an age-old pastime. Arguably, the simplest way to “Halloween-ize” your menu is to plaster jack-o’-lanterns all over it.  

“Sky 726’s Halloween-themed menu focused on graphics,” explains Garces, “With lighted pumpkins looking like they’re about to come alive, this restaurant menu is something consumers will appreciate.”

Can your customers order food directly from your restaurant’s website?

You’re not just relying on third-party food delivery apps to allow your customers to order food from your restaurant, are you? Contact Unity Payments and quickly set up your own online ordering system for your restaurant. It includes the creation of a website (if you don’t already have one) and an app! To get started, please don’t hesitate to call us at 1-800-661-3761 or email us at info@unitypayments.ca.

Author

Danfaraldo