Free menu maker for restaurants

How to make a restaurant menu

• Start from a preset — restaurant, café, pizzeria, bar, bakery or food truck — or from a blank sheet.
• Edit the sections and dishes. Prices accept 8, 8.50 or 8,50; leave one blank for market price.
• Tag allergens and diets per dish. All 14 EU allergens are here, plus vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and spicy.
• Choose a design and accent colour. Four typographic templates, all print-tested on A4.
• Print or save as PDF. The free sheet carries a small credit line; confirming an email removes it.

What this menu maker does that a Word document does not

A word processor will happily lay out a menu, and thousands of restaurants run on exactly that. Where it costs you is the second week: the columns drift when you add a dish, the allergen information lives in a separate folder because there is nowhere sensible to put it, and every price change means finding the file, editing it, exporting a PDF and hoping the printer's copy is the current one. This tool keeps the structure — sections, dishes, prices, allergens — as data, so the layout cannot drift and the tags travel with the dish.

Allergens belong on the dish, not in a binder

EU Regulation 1169/2011 requires the 14 named allergens to be disclosed for non-prepacked food, and restaurant dishes are non-prepacked food. Germany implements it through the LMIDV: the information has to exist in written form, and you may inform guests orally only when that written record is available on request and a notice says so. Because this tool holds allergens per dish, the printed sheet carries them automatically instead of you maintaining a second document that goes stale. The data comes from your kitchen and this is not legal advice — but the structure is here, and it is free.

Four designs, and why they differ

• Classic — serif, centred headings, dotted leaders to the price. The safe choice for table service.
• Modern — clean sans, left-aligned, no leaders. Reads well when descriptions are long.
• Bistro — monospaced, uppercase sections. Suits chalkboard-style and pizzerias.
• Minimal — sans, centred, generous space. Fewest dishes, most air; good for tasting menus and bars.

Printing it so it looks like you meant it

The sheet is laid out for A4 with 16 mm margins and page-break rules that keep a section from splitting mid-dish. Print at 100% — not 'fit to page', which quietly shrinks your type — and if you are printing more than a handful, ask for 120 gsm or heavier so the sheet does not go limp in service. Two things worth doing before a print run: read it on paper rather than on screen, and have somebody who did not write it check the prices.

The honest limit of a printed menu

The sheet you print here is fixed the moment it leaves the printer. The fish comes off at eight, a supplier's price moves, you add a seasonal dish — and the correction is a pen, a reprint, or a laminated card with a sticker on it. That is not a flaw in this tool; it is what a printed menu is. A live menu behind a QR code is edited once and current before the next guest scans, and the printed code never has to change. One complete menu, a permanent QR code and allergen tags cost nothing on the free plan, so the honest suggestion is: print this for the table, and keep the live one for the truth.

Take your menu with you — no retyping

The menu you build here is structured data, not a picture of a menu, which means it can move. Create a free account and it imports as a real menu: the same sections, dishes, prices, descriptions and allergen tags, ready to publish at your-name.yourmenu.app with a permanent QR code. You will not type any of it a second time. That is the whole reason this tool exists in the shape it does.