An editorial read of every menu we receive.
Upload your restaurant menu and you’ll have a written audit back in under a minute. No account, no card, no commitment. Start with a free read and decide later whether you want a deeper one.
garnish reads restaurant menus closely. Not the way a spell-checker does, and not the way a friend in the industry does over a drink, but the way a sharp restaurant consultant would — line by line, with the kind of attention an outside professional pays. Typos, pricing psychology, visual hierarchy, the descriptions that move and the ones that don’t.
The audit is a write-up, not a feature checklist. You upload a menu; we send back a considered piece on what’s working, what’s costing you, and what to do about it. Industry research puts the average revenue an under-optimized menu leaves on the table at $48,000 a year. Most restaurant owners have never had a fresh, professional read of theirs.
We pulled one of last month’s reads to show you. Specific findings, quoted from the restaurant menu verbatim, with the revenue impact backed by industry research — not vague suggestions.
Brunch menu · Read by garnish
Hollyhock’s brunch menu is generous to a fault — fifteen savory items, twelve sweet, and a dietary-callout system that breaks down halfway through the page. The drinks list, by contrast, is restrained and confident: nine cocktails, fully described, no missteps. The two halves of the menu read like they were written by two different people.
Findings
Dietary callouts shift abbreviation mid-page. The granola line reads “with seasonal berries · GF”1 but the buckwheat pancakes read “with maple butter · Gluten Free.” Pick one form and apply it consistently across all 27 items — the inconsistency reads as inattention more than a stylistic choice.
Items are grouped by hero ingredient (Avocado · Eggs · Ricotta), which forces a guest scanning for “something with eggs” to read past pancakes and toast before finding the egg dishes. Brunch menus reward grouping by meal occasion — savory, sweet, lighter — because guests arrive knowing the meal type but not the ingredient. Estimated impact: 6–9% lift in average ticket via better cross-section ordering.2
The drinks list is the menu’s strongest writing. “Tomato martini — heirloom, vodka, salt” does in five words what most brunch menus take two lines to explain. The whole nine-item cocktail list maintains this discipline. Don’t touch it — bring the rest of the menu up to its standard.
Most operators inherit their menu from a previous owner, a former chef, or their own opening months. After that, the menu lives on as a piece of operational text rather than a piece of editorial work. The version that went to the printer is often the version still on the table years later, never revisited by anyone outside the kitchen.
That’s a shame, because the document is doing more work than almost anything else in the restaurant. Cornell research finds that 68% of diners judge a restaurant’s quality by its menu before tasting a single dish. Other work from the same university shows that removing dollar signs from menu prices can lift average spend by as much as 8%. The four dimensions that matter most — spelling and copy, pricing psychology, visual hierarchy, and the menu’s underlying economics — almost never get attention from a fresh, outside eye.
garnish closes that gap. We read every menu the way a sharp critic would, write back a considered piece, and tell you specifically what’s working and what isn’t.
The full audit. A close, professional read across the six dimensions that matter most.
The complete read. Adds menu engineering, voice profile, and rewritten descriptions in your menu’s tone.
Most menus do well with Starter. Plus tends to pay for itself when you’ve got more than 30 items, or when you’re already thinking about rewriting your descriptions. — garnish
Find out what it’s leaving on the table and what it’s already doing right. The first read is free.