A Digital QR Menu for Restaurants and Cafés: What to Put In It and How to Make One

A digital menu, also called an online or QR menu, is your food and drink list on a web page that guests open on their phones. The most common way in is a QR code on the table or at the door. You change a price or hide a sold-out dish, and guests see the new version once you publish, with nothing to reprint. This guide is for a restaurant or cafe owner: what to put in the menu, how it reaches your guests, how to keep it correct, and how to build one on SMTAK.

What is a digital menu?

It is a page at a fixed address with sections, dishes and prices, laid out for a phone screen. The QR code is not the menu. It is a picture that carries the page address, and when a guest points a phone camera at it, the page opens. People search for it under different names: a QR menu, a digital menu, or a menu link sent on WhatsApp. They all mean one thing, a menu page opened from a link.

What to put in the menu

Start with what a guest needs to decide and order, then add what you choose to.

• Sections: order them the way guests order, such as starters, mains, desserts, drinks. Short, familiar names.
• Dishes: a clear name, one line of description naming the main ingredients, and the price in riyals. Say whether prices include VAT or not, so nobody is surprised at the till.
• Photos: for your best-known dishes only, and real ones from your kitchen. A photo that does not look like the plate that arrives hurts you more than it helps.
• Sizes and extras: small, medium and large with a price each, instead of repeating the dish three times.
• Allergens and calories: optional, and your decision. If you list them, base them on your actual recipes and recheck when a recipe changes. Check the requirements of the authority that regulates your business, since we give no legal ruling here.
• Sold-out dishes: mark them unavailable instead of deleting and re-adding them, so no guest orders something you do not have.
• Contact: opening hours, a WhatsApp number and your location on the map.

How your guests open it

Give the menu one address and show it everywhere:

• A QR code printed on the table, at the cashier and on the door.
• A link you paste into your WhatsApp reply when a customer asks about dishes and prices.
• A link on the links page of your Instagram and TikTok accounts, as in a link-in-bio page for your business.
• The menu link on your Google profile. As we noted in Google Maps reviews for restaurants and cafes, Google says restaurants can add menu links to their profile.

Print the code large enough to scan easily, on a matte surface, and test it with two different phones before the full print run.

Common mistakes with a digital menu

• A PDF that opens on a phone as a shrunken page, so the guest zooms and drags. A web page built for phones is easier on them.
• Old prices. A guest who sees one price on the menu and pays another does not forget it, and may write it in a review.
• A QR code that points to an address that changes. If you change the address, every printed card stops working.
• A menu with no way to reach you. Add a number or a WhatsApp button for those who want to ask or order.
• Allergen or calorie data entered without checking. A wrong fact here is worse than none.

When a paper menu stays alongside it

Some guests do not like scanning, and some have a flat battery. Keep a few paper copies for those who ask, and make them a printout of the same digital menu so a price never differs between paper and screen. Above all, staff should know that the digital menu is the reference, and that every change starts there.

Steps to start

1. Gather your dishes and prices on one sheet, sorted by section.
2. Photograph your best-known dishes in good light on a clean background.
3. Build the page and review it on your own phone through a guest's eyes, from the first line to the last.
4. Publish it, download the QR code and test it with two different phones.
5. Print the code, place it, and show your team how to update a dish or a price.

Do tell guests the digital menu exists: one short line on the table, such as Scan the code to open the menu, is enough.

How to keep prices right

Name one person responsible for the menu. Make updating it a step in every pricing decision, not a task that gets forgotten. Review the whole menu once a month, say, and compare it with the till. A digital menu makes edits easy, but it does not edit itself.

A digital menu on SMTAK

On SMTAK you build the menu from the dashboard, in the Pages section, and it publishes at an address like smtak.com/p/your-business/menu. What the tool actually has:

• Ready templates for a restaurant and a cafe to start from, plus sections, dishes, prices and photos.
• Sizes with a price each, and badges such as New, Most ordered, Spicy and Vegetarian.
• Allergens: you pick from nine kinds that you declare for each dish, and the platform does not check them. Calories are optional.
• A switch to hide a dish when it runs out, and Arabic and English in the same menu.
• A WhatsApp button that opens a chat with a ready message if you add your number. It only opens the chat, and SMTAK does not handle payment or orders.
• A QR code you download as SVG for large prints or as PNG, and counts of menu visits and QR scans.

Publishing needs a paid plan that includes the menu, or buying it on its own, with no plan, as a paid add-on; the free trial does not build it. We do not say the menu is free, because it is not. Free tools exist for a simple menu, and they may be enough if all you want is a fixed list. The difference is that here the menu is part of an account that also holds your links page, reviews and replies. The current plans and price are shown with the details on the digital menu page.

The menu and your reviews

A guest who scans the menu code at the table is ready to be asked for an opinion after the meal. Put a Google Maps review code next to it, and create one for free with the review link and QR tool. Ask every guest the same way, with no reward and no filtering of happy customers, as in the guide to getting more reviews.