Restaurant menu online, and where it should live

For your trade 6 min read

Your menu exists in six places online and no two of them agree. Here is how to pick the copy that is the real one and keep the rest pointing at it.

Before you change anything about your menu online, do one thing. Open a phone, search your own restaurant the way a stranger would, and find every version of the menu that comes back.

Most places find five or six. Almost none of them agree, and the one a hungry stranger reads first is rarely the one you think of as yours.

Count the copies before you change anything

Write the list down with a date next to each. Your own website. Your Google listing. The Facebook page. Two delivery apps. A review site that scraped something years ago. A PDF a designer made when the place opened, still sitting on a link somebody shares.

Then look at what is on each one. Dishes you stopped doing. A price that has moved twice since. A vegetarian section that has grown since that copy was made. A whole menu from a chef who left.

None of this is anybody's fault. Every one of those copies was correct on the day it was made, and there was never a moment when somebody was supposed to go back to all six.

One copy is the real one, and you pick which

Nobody keeps six menus updated past February. The fix is deciding which one is real.

The copy on a page you own is the one to choose, because it is the only one that cannot be changed, moved or switched off by a company you have no relationship with. Everything else either links to that page or gets copied from it when it changes.

Then write the route down as a short list on a wall somewhere: when the menu changes, edit the page first, then the delivery apps, then the listing. Three steps, in that order, done by whoever changed the food.

It is fine for the delivery menu to be different. Fewer dishes, because half of yours do not survive fifteen minutes in a box. Different prices, because the app takes a cut and the packaging costs money.

Two things go wrong. The first is silence: people find a delivery price and assume it is your dining room price. One line on your own menu page saying delivery prices differ from the prices in the restaurant settles it.

The second is that the app menu becomes the only one anybody maintains, because it is the one that takes orders. You are then in the position of renting the main public description of your food, at somebody else's price, on somebody else's terms, with no copy of your own.

What Google shows when you have not told it anything

Your listing has a place for a menu link, and it is worth filling in with a link to your own page rather than a PDF.

If you leave it empty, the space does not stay empty. Search will show whatever it can find about your food from elsewhere, and on top of that, strangers can suggest corrections to a listing. That is occasionally helpful and occasionally somebody's memory of a dish from two years ago.

So put the link in, then look at your own listing on a phone once a month and read what it says about your food. Whatever is wrong there is wrong in the place most people look first.

There is a temptation to put everything online, which produces a system for daily specials that gets used for eleven days and then abandoned. The abandoned version is worse than nothing, because now the page says Tuesday's special and it is Saturday.

Split it. The menu page holds what is on for weeks or months, and it is worth keeping right. Today's specials go where they are cheap to post and expected to be short-lived, and the menu page can carry one honest line saying there is a specials board in the room that changes daily.

That sentence tells somebody there is more than what they are reading, and it stops the page from having to be true by three o'clock every afternoon.

Sold out, seasonal, and the two-minute edit

A menu online keeps changing, so the test of your setup is how long a change takes rather than how it looks.

Somebody has to be able to strike a line at four in the afternoon, from a phone, in the building, without calling anyone. If a change requires an email to whoever built the site, the menu will be out of date by the end of the season and there is no amount of good intention that prevents it.

Add a small line at the bottom of the page saying when it was last updated. It tells a reader whether to trust what they are reading, and it reminds you when the last time was.

Allergens, and the sentence you can honestly write

Be careful about publishing a full allergen grid. People do want it, but a grid has to be true for every dish on every day, and one substituted ingredient makes it wrong in a way that matters.

What you can honestly do is mark the things that are stable and obvious, keep the wording simple, and add a plain sentence: tell us when you order and we will tell you what we can do. The kitchen is the source of truth, and saying so is better than a chart nobody has checked since spring.

If somebody asks by email or through the site, answer it the same way you would at the table. That question is often the difference between a table of four booking and going elsewhere.

A short checklist

Every online copy of your menu found and dated
One copy on a page you own named as the real one
A written three-step route for updating, in order, by whoever changed the food
One line saying delivery prices differ from in-house prices
The menu link filled in on your listing, pointing at your own page
Specials kept off the menu page, with a sentence saying the board exists
A last-updated date at the bottom of the page
Somebody in the building able to edit it from a phone in two minutes

Questions people ask

Can I let the delivery apps carry my menu for me

You can, and many places do, but you are then renting the main description of your food. Keep a copy on a page you own and point everything at it.

Should my delivery prices match my dine-in prices

There is no rule saying they must. If they differ, say so in one line on your own page so nobody arrives expecting the other number.

What about the menu I post on Instagram

Fine as a photograph of the board, useless as the menu itself. It cannot be searched, it cannot be read out by a phone, and it is buried in a week.

How do I get a menu onto my Google listing

There is a menu link field in the listing. Put your own menu page in it, not a PDF, then check on a phone that the link opens properly.

Do I need a photograph of every dish

No, and a bad photograph of every dish is worse than a few good ones. Choose the four or five dishes you would want somebody to order and shoot those properly.

Who in the building should be able to edit the menu

Whoever is there when it changes. If that is one person and they are on vacation, it needs to be two.