Point it at a page, never at a PDF
The most common QR menu is a code that opens a PDF. It is also the one guests abandon fastest. A PDF opens in a viewer, arrives zoomed to fit a page designed for A4, and requires pinching and dragging on a phone to read a single price.
A menu page built for mobile does none of that. It also has a second advantage: a real page can be read by search engines, so the same content that serves the table can help you appear in search results. A PDF helps with neither.
Assume a bad connection
Restaurants are frequently the worst possible network environment: thick walls, a basement dining room, forty people sharing one cell tower. Your menu has to load on two bars of signal, and it has to load in the couple of seconds before someone gives up and looks for a printed card.
In practice that means compressed images or no images at all above the fold, text that renders before photography arrives, and no dependency on a large script bundle just to show a list of dishes. If your menu takes six seconds on a good connection, it will never load on a bad one.
Placement decides scan rate
A code on a poster by the door gets scanned by nobody, because the decision to look at a menu happens once seated. Put it where the guest is looking at the moment they want it.
- One code per table, on the table, at reading distance. Table tents and printed decals both work.
- Include a line of text saying what it is. "Scan for menu and to order" outperforms an unlabelled code, because a bare code could be anything.
- Keep the code large enough to scan in low light. Dim dining rooms defeat small codes.
- Add a second code at the bar and one on the window for people deciding whether to come in.
Do not throw away the printed menu
A QR menu should be the fast path, not the only path. Some guests will not scan: phone out of battery, no data, reading glasses in the car, or simply a preference not to look at a screen over dinner. Removing the printed menu entirely turns those guests into a service problem.
Keep a handful of printed copies behind the counter for anyone who asks. The savings from a QR menu come from not reprinting the whole stack whenever a price changes, not from having zero paper in the building.
The real benefit is the edit, not the code
The point of a digital menu is that a price change, a sold-out special, or a new dish is one edit that appears instantly on every table, the website, and the app at once. That is where the time and money actually come back.
Which means the setup only works if editing is genuinely easy for whoever runs the floor. If a change requires emailing the person who built the site, the menu will drift out of date within a month and you will be back to guests asking about a dish you stopped serving.
A short checklist before you print
Run through this before committing to a print run of table decals, because reprinting them is the expensive part.
- The code opens a mobile page, not a PDF or an image.
- The page loads in under three seconds on a phone using mobile data, not the venue wifi.
- Prices and dish names are text, so they can be read by search engines and by screen readers.
- Someone on the floor can change a price without contacting anyone.
- There is a labelled code on every table, and printed menus available on request.