From functional list to the main character of meals, menu design has evolved in Indian dining

One of the eternal mysteries of dining out is why restaurants are so stingy with handing out individual menus and why they are so eager to whisk these away the minute you have placed your first order. Who hasn’t pored over a menu over another person’s shoulder, or refused to hand it over to a smiling but determined server, or, increasingly often in middle age, lit a smartphone torch to read tiny print?

Yet, menus are indispensable—and today, they are not mere purveyors of information but vehicles of storytelling that restaurants increasingly rely on to not just tell you what’s on offer but say something about their ethos and sensibilities. In fine dining, menus used to be standard, leather-bound books with thick pages listing, without fanfare, all the drinks and dishes, helpfully titled “starters”, “mains”, “desserts” and so on.

Today, there are as many types of menus as there are restaurants—from elaborate ones that make a solid effort to ensure you don’t lack reading material at the table to exquisitely minimal ones printed on handmade paper, menus that take themselves very seriously as well as playful ones that seem to hint and not declare, chalkboard menus and the dreaded QR code ones. The lingua franca of menus has changed as well; from the simple terminology of starters and main courses, we have adapted to terms like “small plates”, “bar bites” and “chakhna”.

“Menu design in India has evolved with the evolution of dining out,” says Aparna Ranjan, founder of the Bengaluru-based graphic design company Design Brew, which has worked with several city restaurants to build their menus. “As Indian F&B became more elaborate and sophisticated, the design language of dining out also kept pace, becoming more individualistic and specific.”

People collect menus—a friend shared photographs of the menu from Naar, chef Prateek Sadhu’s modern Indian restaurant in the Himalayas, that she has kept as a souvenir of the meal. It has a distinctly hipster vibe—a deceptively simple corkboard folder holding pages with exquisite hand-drawn illustrations.

Another shares videos of a menu kit from a pop-up by Gaggan Anand—complete with a torch that lights up writing on a page that seemed blank a moment ago.

Out for a drink recently, I took at least half an hour to go through the menu of One Floor Down, a Bengaluru bar that makes an elaborate game of the whole experience, inventing characters that represent each drink and creating a cocktail flavour chart with graphs and illustrations.

The Bombay Canteen’s The Canteen Cocktail Book has become a famous collectible among diners. With new editions each year themed around the city of Mumbai, it is not just a menu but an ode to the city itself.

“Since we launched our restaurants, the change in our menus is evident, not just because the brand has grown but because our audience has matured and global design sensibilities—fonts, colours, and visual cues—have shifted,” says Yash Bhanage, founder & COO of Hunger Inc. Hospitality, which owns and operates restaurants like The Bombay Canteen, Papa’s, Veronica’s and O Pedro.

“Since it exists only for a year, it is important that each one has a distinct wow factor,” says Bhanage about The Canteen Cocktail Book.

There is a move towards the minimal in menu design, feels Pritha Thadani, co-founder and creative director of Please See, a Mumbai-based creative agency that has worked with several clients in the F&B space, including Hunger Inc.

“The biggest shift hasn’t been aesthetic, it’s behavioural. People still want to feel immersed, they still want storytelling, but attention spans are shorter and diners are less patient with overt exposition. We’ve lost the long opening essays and over-designed formats,” says Thadani, talking about “adding value through nuance”—naming a section something more evocative than “Mains”, using a chef’s actual handwriting, and weaving in imperfection and rawness.

“Menus are getting a lot more precise and concise, which also shows the confidence of chefs. They don’t feel the need to over-explain themselves or please everybody. They don’t have to have something for everyone, which was the attitude earlier. Hence the confidence, which translates into design as well,” says Akhila Srinivas, founder of The Courtyard in Bengaluru, which hosts restaurants like The Middle Room, Wine in Progress and The Conservatory. The design language common to all the spaces here is contemporary, minimal and clean, worked on by Design Brew with inputs from Srinivas, who is an architect.

There are, equally, any number of spaces that have elaborate and extensive menus—even a few that have multiple ones. At Circa 11 in Bengaluru, the mood and the menu keep changing through the day, and the restaurant, which calls itself “shapeshifting”, has five distinct menus (Coffee, Lunch, Dinner, Wine and Cocktails, Brunch) apart from seasonal ones.

“We want the shifts to happen in a way that they feel natural and not gimmicky—they are about the ingredient, about the season, how everything changes in the kitchen,” says chef Pradyumna Harithsa who owns and runs Circa 11.

As if he’s read my mind about restaurants being stingy with menus, Harithsa volunteers the information that they try to hand copies of the menu to each person at the table. “This means a lot of training, keeping track of multiple sets of menus. The staff is trained to do that. While we have dynamic menus, we made a conscious decision to not use QR codes,” he adds.

Possibly the least favourite format of menu design, at least with diners, is the QR code menu, a legacy of the pandemic when fears of the virus spreading through surface contamination (later dismissed as a minor issue) led to restaurants asking diners to scan QR codes with their phones to access a digital menu.

Most people find them highly annoying—who wants to interrupt a meal multiple times to open a fiddly scanning app or camera and squint at tiny text on the phone? Yet many restaurants continue to use them, citing flexibility and convenience.

Pravesh Pandey, owner of One Floor Down of the elaborate menu, says even though he conceptualised that one and sees the value in it, many of his restaurants like Roxie and Helen’s Place have QR code menus—maybe something to do with the Gen Z demographic these places attract with their bright, Instagrammable interiors, reasonably priced but sophisticated cocktails and cheerful pub grub.

Digital menus also cost less to produce, and making changes is as easy as editing a Word document.

“The format allows us to experiment faster, introduce new dishes more frequently… Ultimately, the choice between physical and digital menus is made restaurant by restaurant, based on how dynamic the concept and menu are meant to be. They allow kitchens and bar teams to respond quickly to seasonality, ingredients, and creative ideas without long lead times,” says Pandey in defence of QR code menus.

Then there are chef’s tables with no menus at all. Dining at the newly opened Nila in Bengaluru, where chef Rahul Sharma brings each dish to the table with the air of a conjuror, one did not miss a printed menu and instead delighted in the surprise as each course unfolded.

The familiar has its place too—one’s favourite restaurants are likely to be the spaces where one doesn’t even need to look at the menu.