Lower top and bottom padding of menu items?

[natural-harmonia-gropius]

[tomasklaen]

Menu item font size is calculated as a fraction of menu_item_height, but if you have a font that has naturally high ratio between line height and glyph height, you can use font_scale to fix that.

This seems to be the case for you, since the intended look with the font I'm designing with looks like this (more even horizontal vs vertical padding):

So in practice: lower menu_item_height and/or bump font_scale.