Building your menu

Available in the Basic, Enterprise and Pro plans. View plans

What this covers

Creating categories and items, and keeping them in the right order. Needs the manage-settings permission.

Start with the menu itself

At Property Settings → Digital Menu, choose Create Menu if you have not already. Give it a name, a description if you want one, and set your currency as a three-letter code — EUR, GBP, USD.

Leave Publicly visible off while you build. Nobody should scan a code and find half a menu.

Categories

Add Category for each section: Starters, Mains, Desserts, Wine, Cocktails.

  • Give each a name, and a description if it needs one ("All our pasta is made in house").
  • Drag to reorder. The order here is the order guests read, and it is the tab bar across the top of their screen.
  • Deactivate a category to hide the whole section without deleting it — useful for a seasonal list.

Get these right before adding items. Reorganising 60 dishes afterwards is tedious; moving four categories is not.

Keep categories to the number a guest can scan across their phone. Eight is a lot. If you have "Starters", "Small Plates" and "Nibbles", consider whether guests see the difference.

Items

Select a category, then Add Item. The essentials:

  • Name — what it is called on the plate.
  • Description — what is in it. Guests cannot ask a phone a question, so this is where you answer it.
  • Price — a number; the currency comes from the menu.

Everything else — allergens, tags, image, choices — is covered in Item details: allergens, tags and images and Option groups and choices.

Items also drag to reorder within their category. Put your best sellers near the top; most guests do not scroll to the end of a long list.

Marking something off

Every item has an Available switch. Turn it off and the guest sees it as Sold Out rather than the item disappearing — which is usually what you want, because it explains itself and it is one tap to bring back tomorrow.

Use this rather than deleting. Deleting a dish you serve every winter means retyping it every winter.

Publishing

When the menu reads properly, turn Publicly visible on. Use Preview first to see it exactly as a guest will.

A sensible order to work in

  1. Create the menu, set the currency, leave it private.
  2. Add every category, in reading order.
  3. Add items to one category and check how they look before doing the other fifty.
  4. Add allergens and tags as you go — retrofitting them across a whole menu is a horrible evening.
  5. Add photos to your best dishes only.
  6. Preview, then publish.
Previous The digital menu, explained Next Item details: allergens, tags and images