Almost everything in the Kendo UI library can have its visual aspect changed by use of templates. Unfortunately this does not apply to the visual interface for the Kendo Menu object. Please can you consider adding this functionality.
Thanks for voicing this suggestion, Stuart. Indeed the menu widget does not support templates, since our intention is to make it as simplistic and fast performing navigation widget as possible. Including support for templates could potentially make it much heavier in some scenarios (especially when using nested menu item groups) and not very mobile friendly. If you would like to utilize templates and have built-in responsive behavior when using navigation on various screen sizes, consider making use of our toolbar widget for this purpose: http://demos.telerik.com/kendo-ui/toolbar/index I hope this substitution makes sense.