A photograph on a menu does one thing reliably: it moves orders towards the dish in the picture and away from the ones around it. That is a tool, and like most tools it does damage when it is pointed carelessly.

Photograph the few, not the many

A menu where everything has a picture is a menu where nothing stands out, and it reads like a place you would find beside a motorway. A menu with four photographs is a menu that has told you what to order.

So the question is not which dishes look good. It is which four dishes you want more people to order.

The ones worth the space

• The dish that earns well and does not sell enough. This is the whole point.
• The one nobody understands from its name. A photograph explains it faster than a sentence.
• The thing you are known for, because a first-time guest is looking for it.
• Anything where size is the question. Sharing plates, a whole fish, a burger people ask about.

The ones to leave alone

Soup. Stews and curries. Anything brown, anything under sauce, anything that arrives looking different depending on the hand that plated it. These photograph badly on the best day, and a guest who orders the picture and gets the reality remembers it.

Also leave the specials alone. A photograph is a promise about a dish that is on for eleven days, and the picture will outlive it somewhere.

One hand, one light, one day

Mixed photographs read as worse than no photographs. Four pictures shot on the same afternoon, in the same light, from the same angle, look like a restaurant. The same four gathered over two years from three phones look like a listing.

This is a morning of work with a window, a phone and whoever plates best. Shoot slightly from above, near the glass, no flash. Then upload them once and be done.

The menu has to work without them

Most menus start with no photographs at all, and some never get any. That is fine, and it is worth checking that the design you picked still looks like a real restaurant with nothing but words on it — good spacing, clear sections, prices that line up. A layout that only works once it is full of pictures will look broken for the entire first month.

Four photographs are a recommendation. Forty are a catalogue.