TYPES OF MENU

 

TYPES OF MENU

Menu plays a vital role in restaurant sales, hence it has become a very important tool of restaurant sales & customer building. Menus are of various types but there are mainly two types i.e.  À la carte & Table d’ hôte. However, the classification chart shown below is an attempt to categories the menus in simple class.

• À la carte

À la carte literally means “in style of card” or “from the card”. Each dish is individually priced & customer has to pay only for whatever he eats. À la carte menu has elaborate number of items giving a wide choice to the guest.

 

•     Table d'hôte

Table d'hôte literally means "host's table" or “the table of the host”. It is a fixed menu with fixed price & customer has to pay for entire menu & irrespective of whatever he/ she eats. Such a menu may also be called prix fixe ("fixed price"). The terms "set meal" and "set menu" are reasonably common as well. This is because the menu is set, the cutlery on the table may also already be set for all of the courses.

 

Following are the menus that can be a part of the Table d'hôte menu.

 

•    Cyclic Menu

This is a type of Table d'hôte menu which is followed in the establishments such as residential hotels, resorts, cafeterias where people reside for a longer period, for a few months to a year. Such establishments follow a set of six, nine, twelve or fifteen menus which are repeated periodically & called as Cyclic Menu.  This kind of menu is unreliable to the diners as on each day of the week, the menu would change so that they might as well forget the dishes they have consumed last week.

 

ü           Carte du Jour              

It literally means card of the day. It is a menu, listing dishes available on a particular day. This may change every day.

 

ü          Plat du Jour              

It literally means dish of the day. Similar to Carte du Jour menu it can also change every day.