Christmas menu printing: sizes, stocks, lamination and how many to order

Every year from about the second week of November the same email lands: "Can we get 50 Christmas menus by Friday?" Usually yes, and usually the menu arrives as a Word document with the prices still in draft. This guide is what I would say to that email if I had time to say it properly. It covers the sizes that work, the stock we use, when lamination is worth it and how to settle on a quantity. All prices are inclusive of VAT and all of it is printed at our studio on Washington Street in Glasgow. The Christmas menu printing page has the full price table if you just want the numbers.

Which size to print

Three sizes cover nearly every Christmas menu we print. An A4 sheet, either flat or folded to A5, is the classic festive set menu: starters, mains and puddings on the inside, a wine list or the booking terms on the back. 25 cost £45, 50 cost £75, 100 cost £120 and 250 cost £199. It is the size to pick if you are running a party menu with a per-head price and pre-orders, because there is room to print the pre-order form on the same sheet.

An A5 flat menu is the single festive page that sits inside or beside your usual menu. 25 cost £35, 50 cost £55, 100 cost £85 and 250 cost £149. Cafes and bars use it for a short Christmas special list without reprinting the whole menu. The third size is DL, the tall narrow card that fits a drinks list, a dessert list or a mulled wine and hot toddy card. 25 cost £30, 50 cost £45, 100 cost £70 and 250 cost £120.

If you want something that stands up on the table, a 350gsm table talker or tent card is the right product: 25 for £35, 50 for £55, 100 for £90 and 250 for £175. They work well for a festive cocktail, a bookings message or a gift voucher prompt at the point where people are already spending.

The stock we use and why

Our standard menu stock is 250gsm silk, printed double-sided on the Xerox digital press in the studio. Silk is the sensible middle: it has a slight sheen so colour and food photography look rich, but it does not glare under candlelight or fairy lights the way a gloss stock can. At 250gsm it is stiff enough to hand across a table without flopping, and it folds cleanly to A5 without cracking along the crease.

Because the press is in-house, a menu is 2 to 3 working days standard, and if your order is in by Wednesday 1pm we guarantee it the same week. That matters in December, when a supplier who quotes "4 to 5 working days" is really quoting the week after next.

Laminated menu printing: when it earns its keep

Lamination is a thin clear film sealed over both sides of the printed sheet. We offer it in matt or gloss, and it makes the menu wipe-clean, which is the whole point in a party season. A menu that gets handled by a table of twelve every night from late November will look tired by the second week of December without it. With it, a spilled Baileys is a cloth and thirty seconds.

It adds £15 on 25 menus, £25 on 50, £40 on 100 and £80 on 250, on top of the menu price. Gloss lamination makes colours punch and photographs shine; matt is softer, hides fingerprints better and reads more easily under low light. For a festive menu with a dark background and gold type I would pick matt every time.

Two honest caveats. First, laminate a menu you are confident in. If the prices or dishes are still moving, print a short unlaminated run first, then laminate the final version. Second, we only laminate menus we have printed ourselves. We never mount or laminate customer-supplied prints, because we cannot vouch for how a stock we did not print will behave in the laminator.

How many Christmas menus to order

The rule of thumb we give people is one menu per two covers, plus a third again for spares. A 60-cover restaurant that turns tables twice on a Saturday in December does not need 120 menus at once; it needs about 30 on the floor and 10 in the drawer for the ones that get soaked, folded or taken home as a souvenir. So 50 is the right number for most 40 to 80 cover rooms, and 100 covers a large venue or a group with a couple of sites.

If you are printing a party menu that goes out to bookings in advance, count the enquiries, not the covers. Every office booking wants a copy per guest, and 250 disappears faster than you would think. The good news is that a reprint is cheap and quick: order the same file again in November and it is 10% off. So print for what you know, not for what you hope, and reprint when the bookings tell you to.

Christmas menu ideas that print well

A few things we have seen work across a lot of Glasgow venues. Keep the set menu to two or three choices per course and give each dish a line of description; a full A4 page with ten mains reads like a takeaway leaflet. Put the per-head price and the deposit terms in plain sight, because the person booking for the office will photograph the menu and send it round. Print the drinks list on a separate DL card so you can change the festive cocktail without reprinting the food menu. And use the back of the sheet for something useful: your Christmas opening hours, a gift voucher line or a January offer.

If you do not have a designer, our Christmas menu design service is £49 for a single page and £99 for a folded or multi-page menu, with two rounds of changes, a print-ready PDF and a web version for your site and Instagram, delivered in 3 working days. The menu design and print bundle is £149 and includes the £49 design plus 50 laminated A4 menus, delivered in 5 working days.

How to print a restaurant menu: the steps

Send us a print-ready PDF at the finished size with 3mm bleed, in CMYK, fonts embedded. If you are working from Canva or Word, send whatever you have and we will tell you whether it is usable or needs a tidy. We send a PDF proof; you check the prices and the spelling of every dish, because that is where mistakes hide. Once you approve, it goes to press, and 2 to 3 working days later it is ready to collect from Washington Street or Cadzow Street by arrangement, or delivered. Delivery is free across Central Scotland on orders over £50, and a same-day courier is £5 in the city centre and £15 elsewhere in Glasgow.

Outside the festive season the same sizes and prices apply on our standard menu printing page, so a January menu or a spring refresh is the same process.

The dates that matter

Menus are printed in-house, so they run late into December. The last order for menus we post is Friday 18 December at 1pm; they go out with Royal Mail Tracked 24 on Monday 21 December. Collection orders run to Wednesday 23 December at 12 noon, subject to press time, so phone first. The studio is closed from Thursday 24 December to Monday 4 January inclusive and reopens Tuesday 5 January 2027 at 9am. Every other seasonal product and its date is on the Christmas printing hub. If you need menus faster than the standard turnaround, phone 0141 345 5841 for same-day or next-day and we confirm the timeline and the price on the call.