Colors are important. Choose classic colors. For the covers, deep royal purples, rich dusky blues, dark greens, chocolate to mahogany browns - are elegant and convey reliability and a sense of permanence. Insipid colors, such as lime green or hot pink create a 'faddish' look. Menu pages on a rich cream paper stock appear more 'cultured' than a stark white finish.
Desktop publishing is great, if there is someone in-house that can do it attractively.
It allows the flexibility of changing menus often. There are also extended families, such as goudy, century, swiss, gill and garmound. The nice thing about extended families is that they work well together in documents such as nameplates, headers, body and captions. Be sure to use a good quality paper. Computer paper is not appropriate.