Private dining & events
The menu your events team closes with.
Private dining is a revenue center, and its menu should not be a photocopy. Menuology builds per-event menus from the same library as the dining room, in your typography, with the host’s name on the piece, printed the day the contract signs.
The problem
Event menus are where the brand standard quietly gives up.
In most groups the dining room menu is designed and the private dining menu is typed. The events manager keeps a template in a word processor and retypes the courses from whatever copy of the menu they can find. The prices are a guess. The whole thing comes off the office printer an hour before the host arrives.
It looks like a different restaurant. It is also the one piece of paper the host keeps, photographs, and shows the person who books the next event. A dining room that spent real money on its typography hands its best customers the one menu that has none of it.
What you get
The dining room’s menu, built for one night and one host.
Same library, same truth
Event menus draw on the same items, descriptions and prices as the dining room. Nothing is retyped, so the wine that changed vintage on Tuesday is right on Saturday’s event, and the price the host was quoted is the price on the card.
The host’s name on the piece
The event title and date are typed fresh for each booking and set in the design, not squeezed in. Where your design calls for it, the host’s logo goes on the piece too. It reads as something made for them, because it was.
Formats for the room and the occasion
A seated dinner, a reception card, a wine pairing, a buffet board: each is its own format in your typography, and the events team picks the one the room needs. The formats are yours, built to match the dining room, not a generic layout with your logo on it.
Printed the day the contract signs
The events manager builds the menu, sees the finished piece on screen, publishes it and prints it in house. No designer in the loop and no waiting. Every event menu is kept exactly as it went out, so a returning host gets last year’s menu back in a minute, not a rebuild.
How it works for your team
Corporate keeps the standard. The events team keeps the pace.
The typography, the layout and the core menu are set centrally and cannot drift. What the events team changes is what should change: the courses, the host, the date.
Corporate sets the formats
Your event menu designs are built as formats alongside the dining room menus, drawing on the same library. Where a location may add its own course or a local wine, you say so; where it may not, the option is not there.
The events manager builds the event
Pick the format, type the host and the date, choose the courses from the library, and see the printed piece as it will be handed over. Nothing to lay out, nothing to retype.
Publish and print
One click produces the finished file. Print it on the machine in the back office or send it to your printer, and it is on the table when the host walks in. What printed, for which event, and by whom is on the record.
Who this is for
Anyone whose events team is running a second, unofficial menu system.
Fine-dining groups where private dining is a meaningful share of revenue. Hospitality brands that open rooms inside a larger property and need a menu at every launch. Franchise systems where the unit has no designer and the event menu is a typed sheet because it has to be. Any group where the dining room menu is designed and the event menu is not.
It is the same Menuology the dining room runs on. If you are already a client, private dining is a format, not a project. If you are not, it is one of the better reasons to talk to us.
Let’s look at your event menus.
Tell us how your private dining menus get made today. We’ll walk you through an event built end to end on sample data, from the booking to the printed piece, in less time than it takes to type one up.