Building your menu
Sections, dishes, allergens and prices — and why the menu you're editing isn't the menu your guests are reading.
Your menu is free, public, and usually the first thing a venue puts online with us. The editor is ordinary — sections, dishes, prices. The part that isn't obvious is that editing and publishing are two separate acts, on purpose.
Edits are private until you publish
Open a published menu and start typing, and nothing changes for your guests. You are editing a draft alongside the live menu, and an indicator appears to say so:
● Unpublished changes
Beside it sit Discard changes — which throws the draft away and leaves the live menu untouched — and Publish changes, which promotes everything at once.
This matters most on a Friday. You can restructure a whole menu across an afternoon, half-finished and full of typos, and the guest scanning your QR code sees last week's menu until the moment you decide otherwise.
Publish changes is always available, even when nothing looks different. That is deliberate: it means a draft can never get stranded, whatever the indicator thinks. Pressing it with no changes is harmless.
Unpublish is a different action with a different meaning. It doesn't discard your work — it takes the menu off the public page and keeps it. Use it for the tasting menu that runs three months a year.
Sections first, then dishes
A new menu starts empty and you add sections in the order guests should read them. A section with nothing in it says so — "No items yet. Add the first one below." — rather than quietly rendering as a blank heading.
Sections and dishes can both be hidden rather than removed. Hiding is the tool for the dish that's off this week; removing is for the dish that's gone. The difference is worth respecting because removal is not quiet about what it costs:
Remove "Vitello tonnato" from the menu. — Its allergen tags go with it.
And for a whole section:
Remove "Antipasti" and everything in it. — Every item in this section is removed, with its allergen tags.
Those tags are the expensive part to rebuild. Hide first, remove when you're sure.
What a dish carries
Allergens are a tagging control rather than free text, so a guest reading in Greek gets the same fourteen allergens your kitchen tagged in Italian:
One menu, many languages
Switch locale with the picker at the top of the editor. Your own language is marked Primary locale, and every other language shows how much of the menu is done — "18 / 24 items translated".
Two fields are deliberately not translatable, and the editor says so rather than letting you try:
Price is one number in one currency; typing a different one under the French tab wouldn't translate a dish, it would misprice it. Allergens are the same argument with a sharper edge — an allergen is a fact about the food, not a phrase about it, so it is recorded once and rendered in each language from the tag.
Leave a translation empty and the guest gets your primary-language text. A blank field is a fallback, never a blank menu.
More than one menu
Menus have a type — Service, Special or Drinks — and you can run several: a lunch card, an à la carte dinner, a wine list, a tasting menu.
Two settings decide which one a guest actually meets. Set as default picks the menu your public menu page shows. Serves binds a menu to a service period, so lunch guests get the lunch card without you swapping anything at midday. A day or season override can swap the menu again for a single date or a whole season — that's the Carnival week menu, without touching the default.
Before it's visible at all
Two gates sit in front of your public pages, and neither is about the menu:
Your public page isn't live yet — it unlocks once the venue is approved and your subscription is active.
New venues are reviewed by our team, usually within one business day. Keep building in the meantime; everything you publish is waiting when the page opens.
The last thing worth knowing is who can do this at all: owners and admins can edit. A member sees the menu and can't change it — which is the right posture for a card that's printed on a wall.