The menu is the most visited page on almost every restaurant website. It is the page that decides whether a group books you or keeps scrolling. It is also, more often than not, a link to a PDF that was last exported in a hurry before a price change.
We have now built menu pages for eleven demo restaurants across quite different formats: a taproom, a steakhouse, an izakaya, a brunch cafe, a vegan lunch counter, a family trattoria. The same handful of things came up every time.
Do not use a PDF
On a phone a PDF opens in a separate viewer, loads slowly, and arrives zoomed out to unreadable. The customer then pinches and drags around a document laid out for A4 paper. Some of them will do that. Many will go back and open the next restaurant.
There is a second cost that is easy to miss. Search engines can read a PDF but they read it badly, so none of your dish names, none of your dietary information and none of your prices help you appear in a search. The single most searchable content you own is locked inside a file.
Put a photo against every dish that needs one
Not every dish. A steak does not need explaining to someone who came for steak. But any dish whose name does not tell a first time customer what arrives should have a picture next to it.
This matters most for cuisines where the names are unfamiliar to part of your market. Without a picture, a cautious diner orders the one thing they recognise, which is usually not the dish you would want to be judged on. A photo removes that hesitation at the exact moment it happens.
Answer the questions your floor staff answer nightly
Every restaurant has three or four questions that come up at almost every table. Put the answers in the menu itself rather than making people ask.
- Heat level, if anything on the menu is spicy.
- Gluten free, vegetarian and vegan, marked on the dish rather than in a footnote.
- What is in it, in full, for anything that could contain nuts, shellfish or dairy.
- Portion size or weight, where a customer would otherwise be guessing.
This is not a nice to have. It is the difference between a table that orders confidently and a table that orders the safest thing and does not come back.
Show prices, always
Hiding prices to get an enquiry works for building work. It does not work for dinner. A group deciding where to eat on a Friday will simply choose a restaurant that told them.
If a price is hard to show because it changes, say so plainly. Market price on a fish dish is an answer. A blank space is not.
Structure the menu the way people order
Most menus online are grouped by kitchen section because that is how the printed one was laid out. That is rarely how a table decides. An izakaya menu grouped by the order in which plates arrive teaches the format while it is being read. A taproom is better served by what is pouring right now than by a fixed beer list.
The test is simple. Read your menu page as though you had never been to your restaurant, and see whether you would know what to do.
Make it changeable without calling anyone
A menu page you cannot edit yourself becomes wrong within a month, and a wrong price on a website is an argument at the table. Whatever else you do, make sure prices and dishes are something you can change from your phone in five minutes.