The QR code is the easy part. Any generator makes one in ten seconds and it will scan. What decides whether a guest reads your menu or closes it after four seconds is everything on the other side of that scan. So these QR menu best practices start where the money is: structure, words, prices, photos, badges, translations. The print job comes last.
Structure the menu for a thumb, not a page
A paper menu is read at arm's length, all at once. A phone menu is read through a window the size of a beer mat, one scroll at a time, usually while someone at the table is still talking — that constraint is the whole of digital menu design. Sections need to be short enough to take in without scrolling twice, and named the way a hungry person searches: Starters, Pasta, Wine by the glass. Clever names like From the Garden cost you orders every service.
- Put the section most guests order from first. Lunch crowd? Mains. Bar? Drinks. Daily specials go at the very top.
- Five to nine dishes per section. Longer lists get scrolled past rather than read.
- Keep the whole menu under roughly forty items. A hundred and twenty dishes is a catalogue, not a menu.
- If food and drinks are both long, give each its own menu (multiple menus sit in the Premium plan).
Restaurant menu descriptions that sell the dish, not the recipe
Two lines. That is the whole budget. A description that runs to five lines gets skipped, and everything after the third is decoration. Spend those two lines on the one thing only your kitchen can claim. Fresh, homemade and delicious are claims every place on the street makes. Aged forty days, six hours in the oven, the ragù our head chef learned in Bologna — those are yours.
Name the ingredient a guest can picture, the method, or the origin. Skip the full recipe: an exhaustive list turns a description into an inventory and gives allergy-conscious guests a false sense of completeness that the badges should handle. If you let AI extraction draft sections, dishes and prices from a photo or PDF of your old menu, treat that draft as raw material — it gets the structure right in minutes, you supply the voice.
Show prices where the eye already is
Prices belong on the same line as the dish name, or directly beneath it. Dot leaders — the periods that walk the eye across a paper menu — collapse on a narrow screen. And never hide a price behind a tap: a guest who has to open a dish to learn what it costs assumes the answer is expensive.
- Be explicit about extras: bread, terrace surcharge, the supplement for the larger cut.
- If a dish is sold per 100 grams or per person, say so on the same line.
- Round consistently. Mixing 12,00 and 12 in one section reads as sloppy.
- In a tourist area, multi-currency earns its keep: prices can be converted automatically or set per currency, so guests see a number they can judge.
Photos: fewer, better, and never all of them
A good photo sells a dish. A bad one buries it, and bad ones are easy to make: overhead flash, a plate that has already cooled, a beer that looks like every other beer. Shoot the six or eight dishes you actually want to sell, on the plates you serve, in daylight next to a window, roughly from the angle a seated guest sees. Then stop. Consistency beats quality: eight photos taken the same way look like a menu, twenty in five styles look like a group chat. Leave the rest text-only, and remember photos are the heaviest thing on the page. A slow menu is a closed menu.
Put allergen and diet badges on the dish
Under EU Regulation 1169/2011, the fourteen listed allergens must be disclosed for non-prepacked food, restaurant dishes included. In Germany the LMIDV adds written documentation: oral information is only allowed when the written record is available on request and a notice says so.
Badge each dish rather than adding a footnote with numbers — on a phone the legend sits three scrolls from the dish it explains. At yourmenu.app all fourteen EU allergens plus dietary badges attach to the individual dish, and allergen tagging is in the free plan. Update it the day a supplier changes, not at month end.
Translate the menu, then read it out loud
A literally translated menu is often worse than none. Dish names usually should not be translated at all: Rösti stays Rösti, paella stays paella, and a short line of explanation does more work than an English name nobody uses. Translate the descriptions, the allergen wording and the section headings.
AI translations get you a complete, readable menu quickly, and at yourmenu.app every string stays hand-tunable, so you can fix the twenty dish names that matter and leave the rest. AI translations are part of Premium. Whatever tool you use, have someone who actually speaks the language read the menu before it goes live. The mistakes that embarrass you are never in the grammar.
QR menu best practices for print: size, contrast, glare
Now the code itself. Failed scans almost always come down to four things: size, contrast, glare and the quiet zone.
- Size: scanning distance divided by ten. A tent read from 25 cm needs 2.5 cm of code; a window poster at a metre needs 10 cm. When unsure, print bigger.
- Contrast: dark code on a light background, ideally black on white. Inverted or washed-out codes fail on older cameras.
- Quiet zone: clear space all the way around. No artwork, no text, nothing touching the edge.
- Finish: matte lamination over gloss. Glare from a ceiling spot or a candle is the most common reason a guest gives up.
- A logo in the centre means the code needs high error correction so the scan still resolves.
- One code per seat rather than per table, with the short link printed underneath for anyone who would rather type.
One more thing worth checking before anything goes to a printer: what the code actually encodes. At yourmenu.app the QR holds a permanent short link rather than the menu URL, so renaming the menu, redesigning it or moving to a custom domain never dead-links a print run. Codes that encode the URL directly do.
Test it before service, not during it
- Scan from a seated position at your darkest table, with the candle lit.
- Open the menu on an old cheap Android and a new iPhone.
- Try it on one bar of mobile signal, not on the office wifi.
- Hand your phone to someone who has never seen the menu and time how long it takes to find a vegetarian main. Over thirty seconds means the structure is wrong.
- Mark a dish sold out and confirm it greys out live on the guest view before you rely on it mid-service.
Measure it with scan data
Once the menu is live, scan analytics tell you how many people scanned, roughly where and when — a Premium feature, and the only honest feedback loop you get. If the terrace tents produce a third of the scans the indoor ones do, they are in the wrong spot or catching glare. If scans spike before opening, the window poster deserves a bigger code.
None of this is a one-off project. Menus drift: prices move, suppliers change, the photos start looking like last summer. The advantage of a digital menu is that fixing any of it takes a minute from your phone and is live before the next scan. The first version is free — one complete menu, a permanent QR code, allergen tags and instant updates, no credit card.