Your menu is the most-read page you own. Usually it's a PDF.
Website design for restaurants, bars and cafes
Almost everybody who walks through your door looked you up first, and the thing they looked at was the menu. If it's a photograph of a laminated sheet, or a PDF that opens sideways, you're losing people at the only moment you had their attention.
- Websites from $1,495
- Fixed price, in writing
- Yours, including the code
Businesses this page is written for.
- Restaurants and supper clubs
- Bars, taprooms and breweries
- Cafes, bakeries and coffee shops
- Food trucks and seasonal stands
- Pizza and takeout
- Catering
Close but not quite? Tell me what you actually do — the work is the same shape more often than not.
Three things decide it, and they're all boring.
Are you open, what do you serve, and how much is it. That's the entire decision, made on a phone, usually within an hour of eating. Everything else on a restaurant website is decoration on top of those three.
Which is why the two most common failures are so expensive. A menu as a PDF can't be read on a phone without pinching, and can't be found by search at all — so nobody searching for the thing you're known for ever lands on you. And hours left over from last season quietly tell people you're closed.
The third failure is seasonal and local: up here your hours genuinely change, sometimes twice a year, and the place they're published is usually a Facebook post from March that nobody can find in August.
None of that needs a clever website. It needs a menu in real text, hours in one place you can change in a minute, and a phone number a thumb can reach without scrolling.
What the delivery apps actually charge.
DoorDash publishes its commission on its own merchant pages: 15% on its Basic plan, 25% on Plus and 30% on Premier for delivery, with pickup at 6% on all three. The other apps work the same way.
That's a real price for real reach, and for a lot of restaurants it's worth paying — those apps put you in front of people who were never going to find you otherwise. What's harder to justify is paying it on the regular who has eaten with you forty times and only uses the app because there's nowhere else to click.
The cheap fix is not an app of your own. It's a site where ordering, or at least reserving, is one tap from the menu, so the customer who already chose you doesn't get handed to a platform on the way in.
Those are other companies' published prices, quoted as published and checked in September 2026. They aren't a claim about what you'd save — that depends entirely on what you're paying for and how much of it you use, which is what the audit is for.
Start with one thing, add when it's worth it.
For most restaurants this is a website job rather than a software one, and the order matters more than the feature list.
A menu in real text
Not a PDF, not a photograph. Text a phone can render instantly, a screen reader can read out, and Google can index — which is how somebody searching for walleye, or gluten free, or a Friday fish fry, ends up at your table instead of somebody else's.
Hours you can change in a minute
One place, edited by you, feeding the website and matching your Google listing. Including the seasonal ones, the holiday ones, and the day you're closing early for a private party.
Reservations or a waitlist, on your own page
For anywhere that takes bookings, a table request that arrives as a proper record rather than a voicemail during service. A module of a build rather than a monthly seat fee.
Online ordering that goes to you
Where it makes sense: pickup orders taken on your own site, paid through your own processor, with no commission on the regulars. The apps keep doing what they're good at — finding strangers.
A Google Business Profile that's actually filled in
It's free, it's where most people meet you, and it's the single most common thing I find half-done. Photos, hours, menu link, the lot — set up in your name, owned by you.
One module is $950, two or three is $1,950, and everything connected starts at $2,995. The price includes the first year of it running: hosting, database, backups and keeping it working. No monthly fee in year one. After that it's $79/month to keep it running, cancellable any month. Nothing renews on its own.
A website on its own starts at $1,495. If a website is all you have, Site Care looks after it for $49/month a month, and it is optional.
The part where I talk you out of something.
Point of sale, kitchen display and payroll. Those are hard, regulated, and done well by companies that do nothing else. Building a custom one would be a bad use of your money and I'd say so.
Questions about restaurants, bars and cafes.
Is a PDF menu really that bad?
Can I stop using DoorDash?
I change my hours all the time. Will I be emailing you every week?
Do I need photos?
Not quite you, or not quite here?
Other kinds of business
Towns where this comes up most
Let's talk about your restaurants & bars business.
Tell me what you do and what's costing you the most time or money right now. I'll reply within 24 hours, and if the software you've already got is fine, I'll tell you that instead of selling you something.