Mexican Fine Dining Restaurant Free Menu Template

Before creating a Mexican fine dining restaurant menu, hiring the best chef you can find for Mexican recipes is critical. These are people who already know Mexican cuisines and what is needed for them to stand out. You shouldn't outsource this job temporarily to an external chef because your cooking staff need to know the cuisine and be led by an expert chef. That’s the best way to introduce authentic Mexican dishes that appeal to many customers with different tastes.

Also, consider the cost of ingredients, transportation, food waste, etc. The most important from all these considerations is knowing the cost of producing each dish. From their production costs and selling prices, you would know the most profitable dishes — though profit margin alone is but an indicator of actual revenue. Some dishes may have low margins but can be highly popular and sell in large quantities.

Finally, use the many free restaurant menu templates for Mexican fine dining on Menuzen to design a hot menu for your restaurant. You could also hire a freelance designer or an agency to do it, but there’s no need for all this since Menuzen can help with your Mexican fine dining menu design, for a lot cheaper.

The most widespread Mexican dishes include the following:

1. Enchiladas

Anyone who grew up in Mexico knows this dish. It’s one of Mexico’s most popular, traditional dishes, often even seen at breakfast.

An Enchilada is a fried corn tortilla cut up into parts and put in a dish. The tortilla is topped with green or red salsa, depending on how spicy the customer wants it. Pulled chicken, scrambled or fried eggs, salsa sauce, and a few other items can be added to the combo.

2. Burritos

This is one of the most popular Mexican dishes and is made from over seven different ingredients. Burritos differ based on their ingredients, particularly the type of meat used. However, they generally contain meat, salsa, refried beans, Mexican rice, and refried beans, all wrapped in a corn or flour tortilla.

To prepare a burrito, the meat is fried with spices and flavouring ingredients, mixed with onions and garlic, and cooked for a few minutes. Once the pot is ready, the chef takes the tortilla and puts about 2–3 spoonfuls of Mexican rice, a dollop of refried beans, some tomatoes and salsa before the mix from the pot and corn is placed on the tortilla.

The final toppings are cheese, veggies, coriander and perhaps a squeeze of lime juice. Your tortilla is folded and placed in an oven to cook before being served. Once you have decided on your particular burrito recipe, you should create a Mexican fine dining restaurant menu.

3. Tostadas

You need a fair few ingredients to make the best tostadas. You’ll start by making pico de gallo — a thinly sliced fresh tomato and white onion salsa. It will need seasoning with salt, pepper, coriander and lime juice. Afterwards, sliced lettuce and fried meat and refried beans are added to the dish.

Tostadas are often served with tortillas and avocados. Other fillings can be sour cream, cheese, salsa verde etc.

It’s a general misunderstanding that fine dining only means particular dishes absent in casual restaurants. However, the reality is that fine diners also miss “casual” dining foods. We see fine dining restaurants increasingly introducing some casual dining recipes into their menu — to the point that industry experts think very soon, there won’t be any significant difference between fine dining meals and casual meals except in the quality of ingredients and service.

Tacos, for example, are cheaply made in Mexico for the masses; they are affordable, popular, and authentic. Fine dining tacos would instead contain amazing experimental ingredients.

Outlined below are the most authentic dishes at a Mexican fine dining restaurant:

1. Machaca

To prepare this dish, you need beef or chuck roast, garlic, dried Mexican oregano, and salt. Slice the meat into tiny pieces, after which you add salt and refrigerate overnight. Then, convert the meat into highly brittle bits via dehydration — you can choose to smoke at 175°F using a dehydrator or spread in the sun during summer. Afterwards, use scissors or hands to break the dehydrated meat into pieces, followed by the addition of oregano and garlic to spice it up.

Using a food processor, blitz the seasoned meat for a few minutes (usually less than 5), after which you spread the finished machaca on a baking sheet to dry till the end of the day. It can then be served with a flour tortilla, in a taco, burrito, etc. Use Menuzen’s best Mexican fine dining menu template to design a menu that easily sells your Machaca dishes.

2. Discada

This dish begins by frying beef or a mix of different kinds of meat (like pork, ham, chorizo, etc.). Vegetables, spices, and other ingredients are added to the cooked meat and allowed to steam for some time.

The mix can then be served with tortillas and other dishes. The primary ingredients for discada are similar to those of other authentic Mexican fine dining dishes. They include meat, fresh veggies, peppers, tomatoes, garlic, and some seasonings (salt, cumin, and pepper).

3. Tamales

Tamales are a classic example of authentic Mexican food. You’ll start by cooking shredded meat (traditionally pork or chicken) thoroughly, with ingredients and seasonings added to it.

Remove the cooked pieces of meat and keep them aside. Afterwards, prepare red chilli sauce with the meat broth since it contains cooked ingredients and a meaty aroma. The sauce contains different ingredients (dried chilli, garlic, salt, flour, etc.) and should be pretty thick.

Mix your thick sauce with the reserved meat and whisk to form an assorted meaty recipe. Next, make dough with your meat broth. To make tamales, you’ll use the dough with your recipe (without mixing them).

The key flavours in Mexican food are a mix of Mexican-origin flavours and others from the restaurant’s host country, such as America, Australia, or Britain. So, don’t expect to find only Mexican-origin flavours in such restaurants or only flavours popular in Mexico.

To answer this question, the traditional Mexican flavours are garlic, cacao, onions, chilli powder, coriander, cinnamon, allspice, Mexican oregano, cloves, thyme, and hot sauce like Valentina and Cholula.

A typical Mexican fine dining meal contains variations of the six abovementioned recipes, plus many more. Examples are discada, burritos, tostadas, machaca pan con tomatillo, pozole, tacos al pastor, tostadas, chillis en nogada, elotes, enchiladas, guacamole, mole, tamales, etc. A key point to note about fine dining meals is that the chefs tend to experiment with the dishes to offer a higher quality of service to the diners. This may imply introducing new ingredients to the mix or tweaking the dishes’ preparation methods.

You can create a Mexican fine dining restaurant menu layout through Menuzen.

Let’s describe a basic layout design that doesn’t have pictures or other fancy artwork but is popular among Mexican restaurants worldwide.

For this simple design, your Mexican fine dining menu can be divided into two, three, or more sections depending on the variety of dishes. Each section is for a particular group of similar menu items. For more accessible selection, sections can be differentiated by bolded subheadings and may be categorised as appetisers, soup salads, drinks, huevos, platos, sides, tacos, etc.

Under each section, you can have different dishes with their titles in bold. You can also organise the foods of a particular section in one, two, or three columns depending on the menu size and indicate the prices in front of the titles (to the far right). Alternatively, you can arrange the names and descriptions of dishes in one column and their corresponding prices in a separate column.

This is just one example of a Mexican menu template. There are dozens more on Menuzen.