Everything the menu can do, and how to make it do it.

Getting started

Everything is run from the admin panel at /admin. Sign in with the email and password you were given. One sign-in can hold more than one restaurant, so if you run several places you will not be juggling accounts.

A restaurant needs a name and a slug, the short word in its web address. A slug of my-place puts the menu at iromenu.com/m/my-place. Choose it carefully: it is what the printed QR code encodes, so changing it later means reprinting.

What to fill in first

Under Restaurant you can set the tagline, address, phone, WhatsApp number, Instagram handle, opening hours, guest wifi name and password, and the currency symbol. The contact details become tappable chips at the top of the guest's menu: a phone number they can ring and a wifi password they can read without asking.

Building the menu

A menu is categories with items inside them. Starters, Mains, Sides, Cocktails, whatever your menu already calls them.

Food and drinks are two menus

Every category belongs to either the food menu or the drink menu. When you have both, guests get a FOOD / DRINKS toggle at the top of the page and the two never mix. If you only use one, the toggle does not appear at all.

Order

Categories and items both carry a sort position, so the running order is yours rather than alphabetical. Put the thing you want sold first at the top. It is the first thing a guest sees when they open the section.

Taking something off

An item can be made inactive, which removes it from the guest menu but keeps it in the admin panel for when it comes back. That is usually what you want for a seasonal dish. Deleting is for something that is never returning.

Prices & offers

Set the currency symbol once under the restaurant's settings and every price on the menu uses it. Prices show with thousands separators, and with two decimals only when the number actually has them, so 1500 reads as 1,500 rather than 1,500.00.

Discounts

An item can carry a discount as either a percentage or a fixed amount off. The menu then shows the new price, the old one struck through, and a small flag: 20% OFF or DEAL. Clear the discount and it goes back to the plain price.

Sold out

Switch on Sold out and the dish stays visible but greys out with a SOLD OUT mark. This is deliberate: guests can see the kitchen has it normally, and they stop asking. It also drops out of the "Hot right now" rail while it is off.

Hot

Marking an item hot gives it a HOT badge and puts it in the "Hot right now" rail at the top of the menu. Use it for a handful of dishes; if everything is hot, nothing is.

Photos

A dish can have a photo, either uploaded from your device or pointed at a web address. Uploads are converted and stored for you. There is a Remove photo button, and clearing the address field also sticks, so a photo you regret is genuinely gone.

What works

• Shoot from above or at a low angle, in daylight, on a plain surface.
• One dish per photo. A crowded table looks like someone else's dinner.
• Landscape crops best. The menu shows photos in a wide tile.
• Photograph what you actually serve, at the portion you serve.

Dishes with no photo

Not every dish needs one, and a half-photographed menu looks worse than an honest one. A dish without a photo shows a clean tile carrying your logo, so the menu still looks like yours.

Dietary marks & spice

Each item can be marked vegetarian or vegan, gluten free, and given a spice level of one to three. They appear as small marks beside the dish name: a leaf, a sprout, GF, or one to three chillies.

They are worth filling in even when it feels obvious. It is the first thing a guest with an allergy looks for, and it saves a member of staff walking back to the kitchen to ask.

QR codes & tables

Under Your menu QR there is a single code for the whole restaurant: download it, print it, put it where guests can reach it. It never expires and it does not need reprinting when the menu changes, because it points at the menu's address rather than its contents.

Per-table codes

You can also generate a code per table. Give the table a number or a name and you get its own code; a guest scanning it sees the same menu with a small Table 7 badge in the header. Useful when staff are taking orders from the same screen the guest is reading.

Printing

• Print it large enough to scan from a seated position. Around 3 cm across is the floor.
• Keep a quiet margin of clear space around the code.
• Matte, not gloss. A spotlight on a laminated code makes it unreadable.
• Test it with a phone before you print two hundred of them.

Making it yours

The point of the product is that the menu looks like your restaurant and not like software. Everything here is under Look & feel.

Colours

Set a primary and an accent colour, and optionally a category chip colour. The primary carries prices, active chips and badges; the accent carries small flags and stars. There are predefined themes if you would rather start from one and adjust.

Light or dark

The menu runs in a dark or a light treatment. Dark suits an evening room; light suits a café at eleven in the morning. It is one setting and it changes the whole page.

Typography

A small set of typography presets (modern, classic and others) changes the lettering across the menu. Pick the one nearest your printed menu.

Logo and header

Your logo sits centred in the menu header, and doubles as the icon on the browser tab. You can put a photograph behind it as a header background, or set a flat header colour instead.

Page background

A background image can sit behind the whole menu, with an overlay colour and a dimming percentage so the lettering stays readable over it. Without an image you can set a flat background colour, or a two-colour gradient.

Cards and tiles

The item cards have their own colour and transparency, so a background image can show through them as much or as little as you want. The tiles behind photoless dishes have a transparency setting too.

Layout

The menu opens in a grid or a list, whichever you set as the default. Guests can switch for themselves with the button in the header. Grid suits a photographed menu; list suits a long one with descriptions.

The side menu

Side menu shows decides what the drawer lists: every category, only the ones you feature, or the ones guests love most. The last option reorders itself as guests use the menu.

Importing a menu

If the menu already exists in a spreadsheet, you do not have to retype it.

CSV upload

Export the sheet as CSV and upload it. Columns cover the category, dish name, description, price and the marks. It is the quickest way to get a long menu in.

Google Sheets

Paste a Google Sheet link and sync from it. The sheet must be shared so that anyone with the link can view it, otherwise we cannot read it. Sync pulls the current contents in.

Auto-sync

A linked sheet can be set to sync automatically on a schedule. Then the spreadsheet becomes the master copy: whoever keeps it up to date is keeping the menu up to date.

What guests can do

• Search the whole menu, matching dish names and descriptions.
• Jump to a section from the category rail or the side menu.
• Open a dish for the full description, the photo and the marks.
• Love a dish: a heart on the item, counted and shown as "12 people love this".
• Leave feedback: a one-to-five star rating with an optional comment.
• Switch grid and list, and switch between the food and drink menus.

None of it asks the guest to sign in, install anything, or hand over an email address.

Privacy policy

If you add a privacy policy it appears as a link in the menu footer and opens without leaving the page.

Seeing what sold

The dashboard shows menu views over the last thirty days, your most loved dishes, and recent feedback with its ratings.

The useful read is not the total. It is which dishes guests keep opening and loving compared with which ones you actually sell. That gap tells you what to move up the menu, rewrite, or photograph.

Sharing the menu

The menu's address, iromenu.com/m/your-slug, can go anywhere: your Instagram bio, Google Business profile, WhatsApp, a printed flyer.

Shared into WhatsApp, Facebook or X, it previews as a proper card with your restaurant's name and a picture: one of your dish photos where you have them, your logo on your own colour where you do not. Search engines see the restaurant's name, description and address rather than a blank page.

More than one restaurant

One sign-in can hold several restaurants, each with its own menu, colours, QR codes and numbers. Switch between them from the admin panel. A group can also have separate admins per venue, so the manager of one place is not editing another's prices.

When something looks wrong

I changed something and the menu still shows the old version

Changes are live the moment you save. What you are almost certainly looking at is the phone's cached copy. Pull down to refresh, or close the tab and scan again. Check it on a phone that has not opened the menu before to be sure.

A photo is not showing

If it was pasted as a web address, open that address in a browser tab. If it does not load there, it will not load on the menu. Some hosts block other sites from using their images. Uploading the photo instead avoids the problem entirely.

The QR code will not scan

Usually size or shine. Print it larger, keep clear space around it, and use matte rather than gloss. If one phone struggles and another does not, it is the print, not the code.

A dish is on the menu that should not be

Check whether it is inactive rather than deleted, and whether a linked Google Sheet is putting it back on each sync.

I have forgotten my password

Ask us and we will reset it. Use the assistant above, or email [email protected].

Something else

Ask the assistant. If it cannot answer, it will pass the conversation to us with your question attached.