How to Build Your Restaurant Website with Solo Menus

Reading time: 5 minutes

Most restaurant owners we talk to don't need a fancier website. They need a website — one that shows the menu, the hours, and the address, and that they can update from their phone between services.

That's exactly what Solo Menus is built for. This guide walks you through building your first site from start to finish. It takes about ten minutes.

Before You Start

You don't need much:

A photo or two of your restaurant (a hero image, your logo if you have one)
Your menu — handwritten on a notepad is fine, you can also upload a PDF or photo and let us pull the items out
Your address, phone number, and hours
An email address to create your account

If you're missing any of these, no worries — you can always come back and add them later.

Step 1: Start the Builder

Go to solomenus.com and click Get started. We'll ask you a handful of questions about your restaurant — its name, what kind of food you serve, where it is. Each question takes a few seconds. There's no design choices to make yet, no templates to pick.

When you're done, we generate a working site automatically. You'll see it in real time as you go.

Step 2: Add Your Menu

This is the part that takes the longest, but Solo Menus tries to make it painless.

You have three options:

Upload a photo or PDF of your existing menu. Our AI reads it, pulls out the dishes, prices, and descriptions, and sets everything up for you. You review and tweak.
Type it in manually. Add categories (Starters, Mains, Desserts), then add items under each one. Drag to reorder.
Start with a template and edit the placeholder items.

For each item, you can add a description and price, and flag any of the 14 EU-mandated allergens (gluten, milk, nuts, etc.) and dietary preferences (vegetarian, vegan, spicy). On the Pro plan you can also upload a photo for each dish.

If you're not sure about allergens, leave them blank for now. You can always come back.

Step 3: Choose a Look

Solo Menus has a few mobile-first layouts to choose from. They're all designed for menus — meaning your dishes are easy to scan on a phone, prices line up, and nothing requires zooming in.

Pick a layout, pick a color theme, and you're done. If you want more control, you can edit individual fonts and colors per section — hero, menu, contact, hours — but most owners just pick a theme and move on.

Step 4: Add the Practical Info

This is the stuff customers actually search for:

Hours — including any quirks like "closed Tuesdays" or "lunch only on Sundays"
Address and Google Maps link — we'll generate the link from the address
Phone — make it tappable on mobile
Email — optional, but nice for reservations or catering inquiries

Spend two minutes on this. It's the part Google scrapes when people search for your restaurant nearby.

Step 5: Add Languages (Optional, but Recommended)

If your restaurant gets tourists or you serve a multilingual neighborhood, turn on extra languages. Solo Menus supports English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and French.

When you enable a language, we auto-translate your menu in the background. You can review and edit translations at any point — and lock specific ones if you've written them yourself and don't want them overwritten.

A multilingual menu is one of the highest-leverage things you can do. It costs you nothing and instantly opens your restaurant to anyone walking by with a phone.

Step 6: Publish

Click Publish. That's it.

Your site is now live at yourrestaurant.solomenus.com. You'll get a QR code you can print and put on your tables, in your window, or on your takeout bags. The link works on every phone, every browser, no app required.

What Comes Next

Once your site is live, you can:

Update from your phone between services. Eighty-six a dish? Open Solo Menus, toggle it off, done.
Print your QR code and put it on table tents, the front door, your business cards.
Upgrade to Pro if you want to use your own domain (yourrestaurant.com), menu item photos, a promotion banner across the top of your site, or an image gallery.

If you get stuck anywhere — a translation looks off, you can't find a setting, your QR code doesn't print right — email us. There's a real person on the other end.

A Note on the Free Plan

Free isn't a teaser. Your site stays live for as long as you want it. You get a real subdomain, a real QR code, real multilingual support, and no ads on your menu. The only thing you don't get is custom domain support and a few Pro extras.

Most restaurants start free, run for a few months, and upgrade once they're confident customers are actually finding the site. That's the right way to do it.

Ready?

Ten minutes from now, your restaurant could be online. The hardest part is starting.