New Zealand Menu Template

If you're looking for New Zealand menu design ideas, you're in the right place. Your New Zealand restaurant menu is much more than a mere display of food items for customers. It’s also an in-built promotional tool encouraging customers to buy specific items and order more than they would without a menu. Before you create a New Zealand restaurant menu, understand that you must introduce specific menu design factors in the menu design. Psychological factors decide how you arrange, price, describe, and decorate your menu items. All these factors play a significant role in the decision of customers. Whatever you do, ensure your most profitable items are the most visible and attractive. You may also consider including high-quality images of your dishes so customers know what they’re getting.

New Zealand has different typical foods and recipes, with many widespread across the country.

Here are our top three most common Kiwi dishes your restaurant can offer.

1. Barbecued Crayfish With Herby Garlic Butter

The ingredients for this dish include crayfish, garlic butter, lemon zest, dill, parsley, chives, butter, garlic, pepper, salt, and lemon juice. Crayfish is the main component of this meal. To prepare it, you’ll need to jumble all the ingredients into a blender and grind them until smooth — you’ll then use this mix for seasoning when grilling the crayfish for added taste and flavour. So, after grinding your ingredients, slice open the crayfish straight down the middle. Cook the crayfish for 3–4 minutes in an oven, then rub most of the blended mixture mentioned all over it and cook it over dry heat until it’s done. You’ll also need to rub the rest of the blend onto it as it cooks and keep turning it from side to side. Our BBQ menu template offers inspiration for other barbecue dishes.

Serve the crayfish with some rosemary fries. You can offer fresh dishes at your New Zealand restaurant to attract customers who avoid processed foods. While this dish is easy to make and takes just minutes, the final product looks and tastes good. Its picture will be perfect for any of Menuzen’s New Zealand free menu templates.

2. Beef and Kumara Stew

This dish’s main ingredients are boneless beef chuck steak and sweet potato (kumara). Its other content includes onions, canola oil, garlic, beef broth, dry red wine, Worcester sauce, thyme, salt, cornstarch, pepper, water, portobello mushrooms, turnips, parsnips, and carrots. Despite its long list of ingredients, it’s a relatively simple dish to prepare. The first step in making this dish is to preheat the oven to about 165 degrees Celsius. Throw in 1-inch cut pieces of beef into a hot pan containing some oil for browning and take out after. Pour more oil into the pan, and introduce chopped onions, garlic, wine, broth, and other seasonings, stirring occasionally. Add the browned beef into the pan and boil before transferring it to the oven and baking for about 75 minutes. Mix cold water and cornstarch in a medium bowl and introduce the mix into the stew. Add mushrooms, diced sweet potatoes, and other veggies into the pan; bake for about one hour, and serve.

3. Pavlova

Named after the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, this meringue-based dessert with New Zealand and Australian roots has a cake-like circular shape and would sit perfectly on your New Zealand menu design. To prepare pavlova, start by preheating the oven to 150 degrees Celsius. Next, draw an outline of a 10-inch dinner plate on a baking parchment. Prepare the meringue by whisking together egg whites, sugar, cornflour, and vanilla extract. Use portions of the meringue to hold down the baking parchment on a baking tray. Introduce the meringue into the circular outline on the baking parchment, using a rubber spatula to shape it into a large meringue nest having elevated soft peaks on all sides. Place in the oven, bake for an hour and cool for another hour. Take it out of the oven and let it cool further. Before serving, gently separate the meringue from the baking parchment; whisk the cream until you achieve soft peaks and introduce it into the meringue’s centre. Throw some berries and the passion fruit pulp over it before decorating it with mint sprigs and sifted icing sugar. See our bakery menu template for other baked food ideas.

Every dish that originates from New Zealand is authentic to that country, and here are three of the Kiwi dishes we consider most traditional.

1. Hokey Pokey Ice Cream

This ice cream was originally unique to New Zealand shops and restaurants. Preparation entails making the ice cream the New Zealand style, then mixing in some homemade honeycomb. It’s vanilla-based ice cream, and almost all ice cream shops in New Zealand have it. The honeycomb—which melts into the vanilla base to enrich its taste and flavour—gives its own unique flavour. The ingredients for the ice cream are caster sugar, golden syrup, baking soda, vanilla extract, cream, and white sugar. The homemade honeycomb and vanilla ice cream are made separately and combined later. So, you need the ingredients for both. See our ice cream menu template for other great inspirations.

2. Creamy Paua

The ingredients required for this dish: Paua mince, canola oil, garlic, chorizo sausage, cream, salt, pepper, and pasta. This sauce is typically served with other dishes, such as pasta. While the sauce consumes up to eight ingredients, it’s easy and quick to make. To prepare, dice and mince whatever ingredients you ought to. Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the mix of ingredients. Once done, pour cream into the frying pan and let it simmer; you should also occasionally stir it. After introducing this sauce into your restaurant, the next important thing is to figure out the best dishes to go with it, offer those dishes, and feature an image of the sauce in your New Zealand restaurant menu design.

3. Herb Crusted Lamb Leg

This dish is basically lamb leg, preferably from grass-fed lambs raised in New Zealand. It’s made from non-GMO lamb, although you can use any lamb leg. However, a grass-fed, non-GMO lamb produces the best taste and flavour for the dish. Its ingredients include lamb leg, mustard, garlic, parsley, rosemary, thyme, pepper, and garnish. To prepare it, you’ll have to slow-cook the lamb leg with some herbs for about an hour and a half. Mix mustard and garlic in a dish and rub it all over a lamb leg generously seasoned with salt and pepper. In a different dish, jumble the other ingredients and press them onto the lamb leg. Cook in your oven for the time specified above and serve afterwards.

The various dishes native to New Zealand cuisine indicate that flavouring ingredient varieties are abundant. Even the few cuisines described here seem to collectively use an innumerable variety of ingredients. As a result, it’d be impractical to attempt to include all New Zealand flavours. However, since the six dishes described here more or less represent the most standard and typical New Zealand foods, their components should form the base of New Zealand flavours. These include the following elements: salt, sugar, pepper, onion, garlic, cream, cider vinegar, lime, chillies, ginger, bay leaves, honey, and others.

A typical New Zealand dish originates from or is popular in New Zealand. All six recipes discussed above are typical New Zealand meals. Others include mince pie, fish and chips, whitebait fritter, lamington, green-lipped mussels, lamb, Anzac biscuit, Maori Hangi, lamington, golden kiwi, etc.

Menu layouts differ between digital and paper menus. The paper menu has more space for a simultaneous or wholesale display of all items. The digital menu, on the other hand, is restricted to the screen sizes of smartphones and tabs. This means all dishes can’t be displayed at the same time. So, if you want to use the paper menu, you can choose a template from hundreds of layouts on Menuzen that you can employ and print afterwards. For example, if the dishes at your restaurant can be categorised based on similarities (deserts, drinks, sides, etc.), dividing the menu into groups will make it easier for customers to choose. You can further divide groups into columns with the intuitive editing tools. For instance, each group can be divided into two or three columns depending on the number and sizes of items on the menu. You needn’t trouble yourself over menu layouts because Menuzen has already handled that aspect as the best free restaurant menu maker.