British Fine Dining Menu Template

The first mistake you don’t want to make is placing your dishes randomly on the menu unless they all provide equal amounts of total profit — which is highly unlikely.

You’ll have some dishes on the menu only because many customers want them, and you don’t want to disappoint them. Left to you, you’d have nothing to do with those dishes, perhaps because they’re difficult to make and offer little profit. The point here is to separate top dishes from low-profit ones so you can place each one where it deserves on the menu.

The second mistake to avoid is random pricing or listing prices in a descending or ascending order in a column. Try removing currency symbols and consider psychological price anchoring. Your best dishes should be priced to appear more appealing than the dishes around them. Lastly, if you intend to print the digital menu on paper, you shouldn’t add more than 32 items to avoid cluttering.

There’s a long list of British fine dining dishes, but some have been found to stand out in several restaurants. We’ve listed the top 3 below, but remember that the “fine dining” in your “British fine dining restaurant” implies quality service not found elsewhere. Hence, you should consider employing expert head chefs to help curate a unique array of dishes that makes your restaurant stand out.

1. Bangers and Mash

The main ingredients for making this British classic are potatoes, sausages, onions, oil, cornstarch, vinegar, salt, spring onions, butter, and milk. Start by cooking the potatoes in boiling water and caramelising the onions in oil. Push the caramelised onions aside, introduce your sausages into the pan and fry them for about 7 minutes. Add water and the other ingredients except for the milk, butter, and spring onions.

Once you have a thick stew with the sausages incorporated, it’s time to mash your potatoes seasoned with milk,  spring onions, and butter. This dish is served hot and displays well on any of Menuzen’s British fine dining menu templates.

2. Fish and Chips

Battered fish and chips is an authentic fine dining British meal that’s insanely delicious and a must-have for many British kitchens. To make this dish, you need fish, potatoes, shallots, peas, batter, flour, salt, garlic, butter, lemon, and mint. To begin, you need the correct batter — flour, water, and eggs. You may use other liquids in place of water to make this mix, such as beer.

Next, coat the fish in flour, dip it in the batter, and fry in oil. Chop the potatoes into chips and fry them in oil. Add fresh parsley, paprika, and salt, and roll the potato chips around to distribute the seasonings thoroughly. Lastly, fry the peas with oil and butter, then mash them.

3. Yorkshire Pudding

Yorkshire puddings are a staple side to many British dishes. The major ingredients are eggs, flour, milk, vegetable oil, and salt.

Make a batter from the mixture with a pinch of salt as the only seasoning. Then, whisk your mixture to get a homogenous batter without any lumps. Put 1 cm of oil in each baking mould, add the batter and then leave to cook for about 20–25 minutes.

The creative twists in a British fine dining menu separates it from a casual British food joint. There are some incredible Michelin starred restaurants serving British tasting menu dining experiences. That said, below are our most authentic British dishes to offer at your restaurant:

1. Sunday Roast

To make this awesome dish, you’ll cook a whole chicken (or a beef or pork joint) with plenty of seasonings, including salt, pepper, lemon, honey, and garlic. Coat the chicken in oil, place on a bed of onions, carrots and celery. Pop it in a 190-degree Celsius oven, and bake for about and hour and a half. Then, cut up your peeled potatoes and cook them in salted boiling water for 5–10 minutes.

Make Yorkshire puddings using eggs, flour and milk. Roast the parboiled potatoes in plenty of hot oil with garlic and rosemary. Roast the carrots in honey and salt. This is an authentic fine dining dish due to its ingredients mix, preparation, and production cost.

2. Full English Breakfast

The ingredients for this dish include eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, mushroom, fried bread, beans, tomatoes, black pudding, and butter. From the name, you know this must be a typical English dish popular among the British. It’s a massive dish designed to keep you going until lunch.

Preparing this dish begins with frying your sausages and bacon in the same pan. Cook the mushrooms, beans, and tomatoes in separate pans, and season the tomatoes with salt and pepper. Fry the eggs and bread separately as well.

Once everything is cooked, put each component onto a large plate. With so many aspects to a full English, there are plenty of opportunities to experiment and make it a fine dining dish.

3. Toad in the Hole

This dish is a British classic that’s been around for the past 200 years and contains sausages, Yorkshire puddings, and a few other ingredients. The sausages are typically cooked in Yorkshire pudding batter.

The first step is to make your batter from flour, eggs, and milk, then let it rest for at least an hour. Add oil to your sausages and cook in the oven for about 20 minutes. Then, take your Yorkshire pudding batter out of the fridge and stir in salt and pepper. Without removing the sausages from the oven, pour your batter all around the sausages.

Next, caramelise some onions and add flour to coat the onions before adding beef stock to the mix. The toad in the hole dish is then ready to be eaten and is best served with the onion gravy.

The major flavours in British cuisine are too many to list here, but there are some classic combinations seen throughout the country:

• Rhubarb & custard
• Strawberries & cream
• Orange marmalade
• Peach melba
• Peppermint cream
• Raspberry ripple

These flavours are obtainable from one or more of these spices: ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, pepper, cinnamon and cloves, etc. Here’s a more detailed list.

With dozens of typical British dishes to prepare in your restaurant, there’s no shortage of offers for your customers. Note that any traditional British dish can be made into a fine dining meal by your executive chef using more original ingredients or improving the taste and look of the dish.

However, these British dishes can be offered at a fine dining restaurant with slight modifications: beef wellington, shepherd’s pie, steak and kidney pie, cottage pie, pan-fried sea bass, Lancashire hot pot etc.

Understand that a menu layout needs to be clear, legible, appealing, and designed to push your most profitable menu items. You must decide which dishes to promote and how many to include on the menu.

Having accomplished these steps, create a British fine dining restaurant menu that best showcases your dishes. Your best dishes should be placed and priced psychologically to maximise their appeal to customers. This applies whether you use paper or a digital menu. As a rule of thumb, paper menus should have between 7 and 32 dishes to best use your layout.