The taxonomy of restaurant menus
Across different types of eateries (fine dining restaurants, casual cafes, fast food chains, hawker stalls) and cuisines, there can be many ways to categorize the information on a menu for each use case. When designing the Menu module on an e-commerce platform for restaurants, the challenge lies in creating a universal structure and hierarchy that satisfies most cases.
The following lemonade stand example illustrates the iterative design process of the Menu module's information architecture.
Products
To open a restaurant we will need to sell at least one edible thing, so let's start with selling lemonade at our stand.
Thus, the simplest menu would consist of a group of products.
Categories
After a few days of running the stand, we realize that lemonade doesn't sell well on rainy days and have decided to introduce hot lemon tea in our menu.
To do so, we have added categories. A menu can have multiple categories, and within each category there is at least one product.
Subcategories
Business is doing great and we want to expand our menu further by adding a food item: PB&J sandwiches! We already have categories, but we need something to further classify them into subcategories of food and drinks.
Categories can be further divided into subcategories but it's optional. Optional entities are marked by an asterisk in the diagrams.
Variations, modifier groups and modifiers
We notice that many customers like to buy their PB&J sandwiches together with a drink, and want to encourage more customers to do the same. Customers have also given us feedback on the taste of our lemonade, some find it too sweet while others find it too bland.
To cater to these purchasing patterns and preferences, we need product variations, modifier groups and modifiers in our information architecture. Variations allow us to sell different versions of a product, in our case, an a la carte PB&J sandwich or a PB&J sandwich meal that comes with a drink. Notice that each product variation can have different (or choose not to have any) modifier groups.
Modifiers are organized into groups called modifier groups. They are used to indicate a specific preference for a product or product variation. In the information architecture below, there are two modifier groups. The first named "Drinks" within the PB&J Sandwich Meal lets customers choose between Lemon Tea or Lemonade. The second modifier group called "Sugar Preference" allows customers to indicate how much sugar they want in their Lemonade.
Putting the information architecture to the test
Every time I arrive at what what might be the ideal information architecture, I would try to 'break' it with real restaurant menus. Below are some popular brands fitted into the final version of the Menu module's information architecture.
