Slogans for your restaurant: what works and what to drop

Why most slogans say nothing

Freshly made. Made with love. Always tasty. Those three lines sit on half the shopfronts in the country, which is exactly why nobody reads them any more. They are not wrong, they are empty.

There is one test that takes ten seconds. Put your slogan under the name of the restaurant three doors down. Does it still fit? Then it says nothing about you.

A slogan is not advertising you sell to your guest. It is the sentence your guest passes on. Whoever says they always order from the place with the wood oven is doing your marketing.

On your menu you have room to explain that the dough proves for two days. A slogan holds one idea, and that idea has to stay put until somebody gets hungry.

Keep it short enough to remember

Short wins for a boring reason: short lines get remembered and long ones do not. More than one sentence is not a slogan, it is a paragraph on your shopfront.

The lines everyone in the Netherlands can finish are all small. Even Apeldoorn bellen. Heerlijk, helder, Heineken. Three or four words, a rhythm that sticks, not one spare word. Those brands put years of television behind them. Your line has to be shorter than theirs, not longer.

Short is practical too. Your slogan has to fit on the side of a box, on a window poster, on your order button, and in the homepage title Google displays. Fifteen words survive none of that.

Try it tonight: write your line on an empty box with a marker pen. If it does not fit on one line, it is too long.

Make it sound like your place sounds

The second question is not whether the line is good, but whether it is yours. A late night counter and a pizzeria with white tablecloths cannot use the same line.

In Dutch you set your tone with a single pronoun. If you are on first name terms at the counter, your slogan should be as well. A place that suddenly writes formally sounds like it changed hands.

Then look for the one thing you are known for. The wood oven. Your mother’s sauce. The fact that you still deliver at eleven. That is what people already say about you.

• The thing you make yourself while everyone else buys it in: the dough, the sauce, the baklava.
• The moment people order from you: Friday night, after a shift, when the fridge is empty.
• The promise you keep every day, however small: never par-baked, always delivered by us.

Your slogan does not have to name a dish either. Some places mainly sell an evening: eight people around one table, the children allowed to run, still open after the match.

What to drop

There is a short list of lines that almost always disappoint. They are not forbidden, they simply do not work, and two of them turn against you.

A claim you cannot substantiate can be read as misleading, and a delivery promise you miss earns you exactly the review you did not want. Write something anyone can check instead: the only wood oven in the neighbourhood. Checkable beats big.

Nothing wrong with a pun, as long as you test it on the right person. Your staff will say it is funny, because that is the safest answer. A regular who needs nothing from you is more honest.

A slogan is allowed to change

Plenty of owners never start, because they think a slogan has to last thirty years. It does not. Large chains swap their line every few years, and nobody is confused by it.

It helps to keep three kinds of line apart. One belongs to your restaurant, the second to a campaign, the third to this month’s offer.

Never change two at once. As long as the main line stays, everything around it can rotate by season. Put today’s date next to your line in your diary and look at it again in six months.

Twenty slogans to start from

What follows is not a supply to copy from, it is a way to see the patterns. Swap the word that does not fit you and it becomes yours. Anything in brackets you fill in yourself.

Write your line in the language your guests order in. For most restaurants in the Netherlands that is Dutch, even when the kitchen is not.

Serious, about quality

• Fresh dough every day, the same sauce every day.
• From the wood oven, not from a box.
• Short menu, big flavour.
• We make it all ourselves, the sauce included.
• Out of the oven, straight into the box.
• The only wood oven in [neighbourhood].
• The same recipe since [year].
• Good dough, good sauce, nothing else.

With a wink

• Not cooking tonight? We are.
• For when the fridge is empty.
• No more arguing about whose turn it is.
• There is always room for one more slice.
• Friday starts here.
• Eat first, talk later.
• The best excuse to keep your kitchen shut.

About your kitchen

• Baked the Neapolitan way, eaten in [town].
• Italian, but from [neighbourhood].
• Turkish bread from our own oven.
• Grandmother’s recipe, today’s oven.
• Home cooking, without the washing up.

Ten slogans about your ingredients and your delivery

If you do something with your buying that the rest of the street does not, your slogan is in there. A concrete detail sticks, the word fresh does not.

About what goes on top

• Our sauce simmers for a day.
• The dough proves here for two days.
• Mozzarella from a single farm.
• Vegetables in season, and nothing else.
• More vegetables than you expect from us.

Delivery often deserves a line of its own. Somebody who knows the food is good still has to hear that you drive yourself, or that collecting is quicker. If delivery is most of your evening, it can be your main line.

One warning: keep times out of your slogan. On a Tuesday you make twenty minutes, on a busy Friday you do not, and your own promise gets quoted back at you in the reviews.

About delivery and collection

• Ordered direct, delivered by us.
• From our oven to your table.
• Order with us, not through a middleman.
• Collecting? It will be ready.
• We drive it ourselves, so it arrives hot.

How to write one yourself in an hour

A slogan rarely arrives in a single flash. It is a list you work through. Sit down at a time when you are closed and take these steps in order.

1. Write down twenty words that belong to your place: wood oven, closed on Tuesdays, always busy, your mother’s sauce.
2. Turn those into twenty sentences. Most will be bad, and that is the point.
3. Cross out every line the restaurant three doors down could use as well.
4. Say what is left out loud, in the tone you use at the counter.
5. Put the list away for three days.
6. Say your two favourites to a regular. Watch their face, not their answer.
7. Pick one and put it everywhere at once.

Everyone’s first five lines look the same, because you have heard them a thousand times. Somewhere around number fifteen comes the sentence that could only be about your place.

Where your slogan ends up

A slogan works through repetition, and repetition can only be organised in places you own. That is the difference between a line that earns something and one that only hangs above the door.

• The title of your homepage, because that shows up in Google as well.
• Above the order screen on your own ordering site.
• On the box, the bag and the sticker.
• In the confirmation email and your offer emails.
• On your Google Business Profile and in your Instagram bio.
• On the window, readable from across the street.

On Thuisbezorgd, Uber Eats and Deliveroo your line has little chance. A listing like that is built to compare on price and delivery time, not to tell brands apart.

On your own ordering site the same sentence is the first thing anyone reads, and that order costs you no commission. So that is where you make it work hardest.

Start on Monday with two places: the title of your homepage and the box. Every guest sees those anyway.