I would like to have the menu at the bottom of the page and the submenu items to pop up not down. It would also be nice if I could easily change the height of menuitems.
This is supported via the direction attribute of the menu widget. You can see it in action using the configuration options in this demo: http://demos.telerik.com/kendo-ui/web/menu/direction.html As for style settings for menu items - you can define them via the k-menu k-item class: http://docs.telerik.com/kendo-ui/getting-started/web/appearance-styling (setting higher specificity compared to the default ones)