Restaurant Christmas menu: pricing, allergens and bookings

A restaurant Christmas menu that works is short, priced per head from a real food cost, built with vegetarian and gluten-free options from the start, labelled for allergens like every other dish, and online early enough for the people who organise the group bookings. This guide is for the kitchen and the floor, not for cooking at home.

Set menu or a shorter carte?

There are two honest formats.

• A set menu at a price per head. Three courses, a few choices in each, one price. The kitchen knows what's coming, groups can pre-order, and you can cost it before the first booking. It's the format of the office party and of Christmas Day.
• A shorter carte. Your usual menu cut down to the dishes that hold up at volume, plus a few festive specials. It suits tables of two and walk-ins, but it's harder to prep for.

A sensible split: the set menu for groups and on the 25th, the shorter carte for everyone else. What doesn't work is the full everyday menu plus a festive menu plus specials: three menus, one kitchen, the busiest weeks of the year.

How many courses, and why

Three courses — starter, main, pudding — is the backbone of the party season, because every extra course is another round of plating for the whole room, and every extra option another line of mise en place.

• Three or four choices per course is plenty. One should be vegetarian by design, and at least one main should be gluten-free without modifications.
• Christmas Day can stretch to four or five courses — a soup, cheese, coffee with mince pies — but only if the brigade can plate that many covers in one sitting.
• A two-course and a three-course price side by side help the lunch trade without a second menu.

Pricing per head from food cost

You don't know who will choose what, so the price has to hold whatever they pick:

1. Cost every dish per portion, weighed and with trim, as in the guide to working out the food cost of a dish. Use your suppliers' prices for December deliveries, not October's.
2. Take the most expensive option in each course. If the whole table picks the beef, the price still holds.
3. Add what comes with the menu: bread and butter, the amuse-bouche, mince pies with coffee, the crackers.
4. Divide by your target food-cost percentage to get the price net of VAT.
5. Add VAT at your rate, then round with an eye on how the number reads — the psychology of menu prices helps here.

An example, with invented numbers to show the arithmetic: the most expensive starter costs you €3.20, the most expensive main €7.40, the most expensive pudding €2.10, extras €1.80. Food cost per head: €14.50. With a target of 30% (the example's — use your own) the net price is 14.50 ÷ 0.30 = €48.33. With VAT at 10% (again, the example's) that's €53.17. At €54 (€49.09 net) the food cost is 29.5% and each cover leaves €34.59; at €52 the food cost is 30.7%. Twelve covers at €54 leave 12 × 34.59 = €415.08 towards wages, rent and energy: margin, not profit.

Christmas Day costs more to run than a normal Friday, so put that into its price instead of hoping volume covers it. The free food cost calculator does the sums dish by dish.

Vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free: design them in

At Christmas the vegetarian in a party of fourteen finds out whether anyone thought of them. Some British and Irish classics hide traps:

• Roast potatoes in goose or duck fat aren't vegetarian. Roast a separate tray in oil, and say so.
• Gravy made on the turkey stock isn't vegetarian either, and it's often thickened with flour.
• Traditional mincemeat and Christmas pudding use suet: unless it's vegetable suet, the mince pie isn't vegetarian.
• The gluten is in the trimmings, not in the bird: stuffing, bread sauce, flour-thickened gravy, and sausages bulked with rusk in the pigs in blankets.

Design a vegetarian main that stands on its own — a mushroom and chestnut wellington rather than the obligatory nut roast — and make one dish vegan. Build gluten-free in from the start: cornflour in the gravy, a gluten-free stuffing, a separate tray. If you can't guarantee against cross-contamination, say so rather than writing "gluten-free" and hoping. The gluten-free guide and the vegan and vegetarian guide go further.

Allergens: the festive menu is no exception

The allergen rules apply to the food you serve, however briefly it's on the menu. In the EU, Regulation 1169/2011 requires information on the 14 allergens for non-prepacked food, restaurants included, and the UK kept the same 14 in its own rules. A dish on for three weeks needs the same information as one on all year, and a new recipe means a new check. How exactly the information must be given depends on where you trade: check with your local authority, the Food Standards Agency or Food Standards Scotland guidance in the UK, or your food safety adviser.

Go dish by dish:

• Nuts in the nut roast, sometimes in the stuffing, in the marzipan on the cake.
• Sulphites in the wine in the gravy, the port in the cranberry sauce, the sherry in the trifle, and in some dried fruit: read the label.
• Milk and eggs in brandy butter, bread sauce, custard, the glaze on the pastry.
• Celery and mustard in many stocks and in a mustard glaze on the ham.
• Fish and crustaceans in the smoked salmon and the prawn cocktail.

December adds two risks: substitutions — your usual sausages are out of stock and the replacement has a different label — and seasonal staff who have never seen the menu. Check every substitute's label, and brief the floor before the first party. The allergen table guide lists all 14.

Bookings, deposits and cancellations

Working habits, not legal templates. Put the terms in writing when the booking is made:

• The deposit: how much per head, when it's due, whether and until when it's refundable.
• Final numbers: the date after which the group pays for the covers it booked.
• Pre-orders: a form with each guest's name, choice and any allergy or dietary need, back by a fixed date. You hear about the coeliac guest in advance, not at the table.
• No-shows and late cancellations: what happens, stated plainly.

Before you settle these terms, ask your adviser which consumer rules apply where you trade: they differ between countries, and a clear term the guest agreed to beats a strict one that doesn't hold.

Publishing it: a separate menu or a section

Publish early: the organiser forwards your link to fifteen colleagues, and the menu sells the table. Here's how it works in Menudetto.

• Every menu has its own QR code, and it stays the same through every edit and republish. On Pro you can create a separate Christmas menu, or duplicate your usual one as a starting point (the copy stays offline until you publish it). After the holidays you take it offline and its page stops being reachable; next November you update and republish it, bring it back online, and the same code works again — keep the table cards.
• The QR already on your tables doesn't switch by itself: it keeps showing your regular menu. Put the Christmas link where people plan: your website, the booking confirmation, social posts, a card on the table.
• On the free plan there's one menu per venue: add a Christmas section to it, so the QR on the tables shows it, and remove it in January.
• One honest limit: every dish shows its own price. A shorter carte goes in as it is; a set menu goes in as one entry at the price per head, with the courses in its description and its allergens declared for the menu as a whole.
• Translations: guests read the menu in their own language on the same page — six languages on the free plan, 33 on Pro. Describe the dishes that don't translate: "pigs in blankets" means nothing word for word, "small sausages wrapped in bacon" does. More in how to translate your menu.
• The paperwork: when you publish you can ask to receive by email the menu as a PDF, the QR code ready to print and the allergen list, for the group organiser and for the pass.

New Year's Eve: same work, different night

New Year's Eve works best as a set menu only, longer and later: five or six small courses instead of three big ones, and a glass of something at midnight. Decide on one sitting or two — an early one for families, a late one that sees the year out — and write on the menu whether the midnight drink is included. Cancellation terms matter even more: a table dropped at six on the 31st can't be resold. In Scotland, where Hogmanay is a night of its own, the New Year's Day steak pie is worth a thought for the lunch after.

The method doesn't change. In Menudetto, New Year's can be its own menu with its own code, or you edit the Christmas menu after Boxing Day and republish — the code stays the same.

Checklist, working back from Christmas

• By mid-October: choose the formats (set menu, shorter carte, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve) and trial the new dishes.
• Late October: cost every dish on December prices and set the price per head.
• Early November: menu final, allergens checked, translations read, booking terms written. Publish.
• November: take bookings and deposits, share the link, send pre-order forms to groups.
• Early December: first pre-orders in, stock ordered, allergen briefing for the team.
• The week before Christmas: final numbers for the 25th, labels checked on every substitute product.
• Between Boxing Day and the 30th: switch to the New Year's menu and confirm its bookings.
• Early January: take the festive menu offline and note what sold, for next year.

Where Menudetto fits

Menudetto won't cook the turkey or take your deposits. It does the menu part: you build and change it by talking to the assistant, allergens are proposed from the ingredients and you confirm or correct them (AI proposals are part of Pro; the free plan has a welcome allowance, then you declare them by hand), the QR code doesn't change when the menu does, and guests read it in their language. If that takes one job off your December, try Menudetto free.