QR menu for a restaurant: what belongs behind the code

There is a sticker over the price of the branzino on the printed menu, because the fish went up in March and reprinting forty covers was not worth it. Everybody in the room knows what that sticker means.

A qr menu restaurant setup solves that particular problem in about a minute, which is why so many places bought one. It also creates new problems if nobody decided what the code should point at.

People write it both ways, a qr menu for restaurants or a restaurant qr menu, and they mean the same thing. This article is about the decision underneath the phrase, and about the two things an Italian menu has to get right whether it sits on paper or on a phone.

The first thing it has to carry: allergens

This is not a design preference. The European Commission's guidance on mandatory food information states that for non-prepacked food, including food sold in restaurants and by mass caterers, it is mandatory to provide information about the substances and products causing allergies or intolerances present in the product, drawn from the list in Annex II of the regulation.

A printed menu can carry that, and many do. The trouble is upkeep. Change a supplier for one sauce and the allergen line changes with it, and the correct information is now on a card in a print shop's queue while the wrong one is on the table.

A menu on a phone is a good answer to that, because there is one place to change and it is changed everywhere at once. Ours has a field for allergens on each item for exactly this reason.

Ask a supplier how their system handles a change to an ingredient. If the honest answer involves re-uploading a picture, the system is a picture, not a menu.

The second thing: it has to open before the table gives up

The other half of the job is speed. A guest holds a phone up, and if nothing useful appears quickly they put it down and ask for paper.

Google's own guidance on page speed is that a site should aim for a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads across mobile and desktop. In a dining room, on a phone with two bars of signal, that is a demanding target and it is the right one.

This is why a scanned photograph of a printed menu is such a poor choice. It is a large image, it loads slowly, and then the guest has to pinch and drag around it. Compressed photographs and a page built for one thumb are not decoration. They are the difference between a code that gets used and one that gets ignored.

A digital menu covers the wider question of where your prices actually live, and scanning a menu barcode explains what the square really is if you want the background.

When paper is still better, honestly

A code is not a religion. There are rooms where paper wins.

A tasting menu that changes daily and is read aloud anyway. A quiet dining room where handing over a menu is part of the welcome. An older regular clientele who will not enjoy being handed a square of card instead of a menu.

The sensible answer in most Italian rooms is both. Paper for the guests who want it, a code for the table that would rather look at photographs and order without waiting.

What sits behind ours

Get Menu is the ordering side. The code opens a menu that can also take the order, which is the part that makes the setup worth the afternoon.

A page that looks like your restaurant. Your own address, 57 colour themes, a font picker, and a photo style toggle so images are square, tall, or absent if your room is not a photograph sort of place.

A menu you change yourself in seconds. Categories and items reordered by dragging. Options and add-ons with their own prices. Required choices so nothing arrives half-specified. Upload the whole menu from a spreadsheet if you already keep one, rather than typing it twice.

A code for every table, generated for you. With a designer so the printed card matches the room, and a print pack sent to you ready for the printer. Even at 12 tables, that saves an evening with a generator and a photocopier.

The table is the address. The guest types no number. Each table code carries its own table, so the ticket that reaches the kitchen already knows where it came from.

One bill for a table. Everybody orders from their own phone and it arrives as a single order, instead of one person reading out what five people want.

Availability that stays true. Counts fall per item as orders come in, and per option too, so running out of one cheese does not remove three dishes. At zero the item greys itself out.

Prices that cannot be stale. Every line is priced again from your live menu at checkout, so the sticker problem cannot come back in electronic form.

Orders reach the team where they already are. A confirmation to the guest and a ticket to your kitchen group on WhatsApp, each one logged so you can see whether it arrived.

A reason to come back. Stamps per order or per euro spent, tiers with an automatic discount, rewards for scanning again on the next visit, and a card in the guest's Google Wallet that updates itself with no app to install. Apple Wallet is built and waiting on a certificate.

Offers that end when you said. Coupons with caps, exclusions and expiry dates, and bundles at a fixed price.

Paperwork afterwards. Invoices carrying your registration number as a PDF the guest downloads without logging in, and a sales dashboard by day and item so you learn which tables actually use the code.

"The best thing a code did for one restaurant we worked with was not speed. It was that the kitchen finally stopped being asked whether the ravioli had egg in it, because the answer was written on the dish where the guest was already looking."

— Agha Shah Zaman, co-founder of Get Menu

What it will not do

It is not a cash register. The bill is still settled at your counter, through whatever Italian fiscal system you already run.

There are no online payments. The guest pays cash or on your own card machine at the table or the door, which also means no card details exist in the system to be lost.

There is no scheduled ordering and no pre-order, so nobody can scan today and book tomorrow. And there is no collection order type, so a guest cannot mark an order for pick-up.

We also do not write your allergen information for you. The field is there, correctly filling it in is the kitchen's job, and it should be checked by whoever is responsible for food safety in your business.

Doing it without a bad service

Put codes on two tables, not on all of them. Watch one full service and count how many guests scan without being asked.

Fix what you saw before printing the rest. It is almost always the stand or the lighting.

Keep paper menus on hand permanently. A guest who wants one should get one without a discussion.

Fill in allergens as you enter the menu rather than promising to do it later, because later is how a printed card ends up with a sticker on it.

A QR code menu is the fuller setup guide if you want it. The trial runs 15 days, needs no card details, and takes 0% of what you sell, so the only spend is on printing.

Frequently asked questions

Is a QR menu legal in an Italian restaurant?

A menu on a phone is fine, and allergen information for non-prepacked food is required either way. Keep paper menus available for guests who ask, and have your food safety adviser check how you present the allergen list.

Can guests order from the code or only read it?

Both are possible. Ours opens a menu that also takes the order, with the table number attached, but you can use it purely as a menu if you prefer.

Do guests need to install anything?

No. The normal phone camera opens the link, and the loyalty card goes into the Google Wallet that is already there.

What happens when I change a price?

Nothing is reprinted. The code points at your live menu, so the next guest to scan sees the new price.

How do guests pay?

Cash or your own card machine, at the table or at the door. There are no online payments in the system, so nothing card-related is held.