Start out making some 2D images.
Once you have all the menu items, make a loop to handle the menu. This will be completely separate from the game loop. In the loop you would draw all the elements in order from bottom to top (depth wise) and check for mouseclicks between x1,y1 and x2,y2 for each button. Perhaps you could use an array of a button UTD to hold these positions rather than having to memorize them. If there has been a mouseclick in the button area of the "start" button, then do whatever initialization is necessary and then move on to the game loop.
