French Fine Dining Menu Template

In a nutshell, you got to know dishes that’d give you the most profit at the end of the day and focus on promoting those dishes through menu psychology and other design tricks.

When diners look at your menu, they start from the top left of the page and go to the top right, then down diagonally to the bottom left, and finally to the bottom right. As their eyes move diagonally down the menu, they hover for a while around the centre — this is where your profitable dishes should sit. Have these facts at the back of your mind when choosing a digital menu template or designing one. A great menu template or design typically obeys this psychological fact.

Below are three of the most common French fine dining dishes in restaurants.

1. Dauphinoise Potatoes (Gratin Dauphinoise)

This is a typical French side dish you’d find in many French fine dining restaurants and can even be served with a roast dinner. To prepare it, you need milk, garlic cloves, potatoes, black pepper, nutmeg, salt, cheese, and any extras you might want to add, but these are the traditional ingredients. As a fine dining restaurant, you might want to be innovative and experiment with ingredients or even food components to decorate or make it more delicious.

To prepare this dish, you’ll thinly slice and then simmer the potatoes for about 3 minutes in the garlic and milk without adding any seasonings. Mix your seasonings when the potato is cooked, then layer half the potatoes into a baking pan.

Sprinkle the seasonings along with some cheese on the potatoes. Layer on the remaining potatoes and sprinkle on more seasoning and cheese, then bake in an oven for 45 minutes. You can easily sell this dish via a good French fine dining free menu template from Menuzen.‍

2. Cassoulet

This is one of the dishes originating from Southern France, and to make it, you need up to 15 ingredients. The primary components of this dish are meat (duck or pork), chicken broth, and white beans. Others include onions, carrots, tomatoes, cloves, pepper, vinegar, duck fat, garlic, tomato paste, and any additional ingredients you want to add to make yours unique.

Start by cooking the meat and beans in the same pot using the chicken stock. Add the other ingredients and water, and slow cook for about two hours. Other raw meats are cooked separately in the oven with ingredients and seasonings.

The final dish is a big bowl of stew, enough for several people. You can create a French fine dining restaurant menu on Menuzen to advertise this dish.‍

3. Quiche Lorraine

This is one of the best traditional french dishes but preparing it can take a bit of time. You need shortcrust pastry, baking beans, eggs, meat (typically lardons), and other seasoning ingredients like garlic, onions, and nutmeg. It begins with baking your pastry in a quiche dish, weighing it down with baking beans.

Afterwards, cook the meat and set it aside; fry onions and seasonings and keep it aside; mix raw egg with cream and seasoning and keep that aside too. When your pastry is cooked, the meat is added, and the other mixes are poured onto the dough for a final baking time of about 50 minutes.

Before describing the authentic French dishes for fine dining, we want to clarify an important point that might otherwise confuse you. The recipes described on this page aren’t limited to the ingredients mentioned. You can practise the cooking art with them to make higher-end dishes — like making something better or equally good but with significant differences. Some ingredients or even food components will have suitable substitutes.‍

1. Confit de Canard

This slow-cooked dish takes time to prepare but is really delicious and worth the effort and time. About five food items are brought together in this dish, not including the flavouring ingredients. The major components are duck legs, beans, vegetables, potatoes, carrots and one or two other food items added onto the plate based on choice.

Marinating and slow-cooking the duck legs is the main thing that differentiates this dish from others. It’s one of the oldest French recipes and primarily uses duck. However, pork and goose can be used in the absence of duck legs. Pictures of this dish will turn out pretty well on any French fine dining menu template from Menuzen.

2. Bœuf Bourguignon

This awesome dish is basically tender beef chunks immersed in a concentrated red wine gravy and makes for a fantastic French dinner. The ingredients include meat (preferably beef brisket), bacon, olive oil, white onion, carrot, garlic, pepper, salt, flour, red wine, tomato paste, beef broth, thyme, a bouillon cube, parsley, butter, brown or white mushrooms, and butter.

Start by heating oil in a preheated oven, sauté the bacon and sear the beef in the oil until brown. Take the meat out and introduce diced onions, chopped carrots, salt, and pepper into the oil. Introduce the meat mix into the pot and add tomato paste and other seasonings. Throw in some flour, and cook for about five minutes until brown.

Then, introduce onions, beef stock, and wine; transfer the mix into the oven and simmer for close to three hours until the meat is tender and soft. Now, in another pan, introduce garlic into preheated butter, throw in the mushrooms, cook for close to five minutes, and season with salt. Lastly, strain the sauce from the meat mix, introduce the mushrooms into the meat mix, add the strained sauce, simmer for a couple of minutes, and garnish with parsley.

This dish is best served with mashed potatoes, but noodles or plain rice equally makes a great combo.

3. Coq Au Vin

This is a French dish usually eaten on weeknights. It doesn’t take too long to cook either. The entire thing will be ready to serve within 30 minutes.

This dish is typically a stew that has its meat slowly braised in red wine. Its key ingredients include chicken thighs, a red onion, dried porcini mushrooms, red wine, and pancetta.

French cooking uses many flavours because it uses some ingredients that you probably wouldn’t expect for food. Their notorious red wine shows up in many classical dishes to the extent one might think French dishes won’t taste good without wine. However, there are many French cuisines with zero alcoholic ingredients.

You’d find several combinations of the following flavours in French dishes: wine, cheese, olive oil, seasonal vegetables, herbes de provence, tarragon, nutmeg, lavender, marjoram, bouquet garni, vadouvan, fleur de sel, fines herbes, quatre epices, and more. You may choose to incorporate these flavours and more in unique ways in your French fine dining restaurant.

Most of France’s fine dining dishes originate from cheap food, which used to be cooked by the poorer in society but have been improved upon over the years to advance their quality, taste, and visual appeal. Hence, you’d find most dishes in French fine dining restaurants have a primitive background.

Variations of all the recipes described above are examples of typical French fine dining meals. We mentioned variations because you may observe distinct nuances based on the type and quality of ingredients used, but the primary idea or even flavour remains the same. In addition to the above dishes, some more examples of French fine dining meals include Salade Niçoise, Chocolate soufflé, Croque monsieur, Chicken cordon bleu, Croque madame, and Flamiche

You can lay out your French fine dining menu in two columns, each having boxes for individual dishes. Give it whatever theme colour you want — black, white, purple, etc., depending on the one that best pops off your food images. You can divide the boxes into two, with one part for food images and the other for descriptions. Prices could be pinned at the top right-hand corner of the boxes.

Using images sometimes requires bigger menus to take all food items. Selling many dishes that number up to, say, 32 won’t give you enough freedom with images even if you downsize them. Plus, reducing image sizes too far gives rise to clarity issues. Sometimes, no matter how much you play with a menu template, you won’t find any extra space to fit in all dishes.

On the whole, the menu designs you can use are limitless in number. Menuzen alone has dozens of French fine dining menu templates, all of which are top-rated designs your customers would love. You’ll be okay with anything on the menu while using Menuzen for your menu designs and hosting.