# Building your menu > Sections, dishes, allergens and prices — and why the menu you're editing isn't the menu your guests are reading. _Canonical: https://seatsat.com/help/building-your-menu_ --- 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 ● Unpublished changes Beside it sit **Discard changes** — which throws the draft away and leaves the live menu untouched — and **Publish changes**, which promotes everything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 > **Name**: Tagliatelle al ragù > **Description**: Slow-cooked beef and pork, hand-cut egg pasta 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: > **Allergens** > > _Allergens are managed in the primary locale only._ ## 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 (\{\{symbol}})**: 14 > > _Editable in primary locale only._ 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. > **Menu name**: Menu del giorno > > _Empty = uses the primary name_ ## 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.