How to create a QR code menu
for your restaurant
Four steps, under ten minutes, no tech background needed. We walk you through signup, building your menu (PDF import works), connecting the TV and printing the table QR. Plus when it pays to combine the QR with a TV menu in the dining room.
First screen free forever · No credit card required
QR + TV
Table + walk-in covered
Your QR menu live
in 4 steps
From sign-up to first scan: under 10 minutes if you have a Smart TV. Add 5 more for a Chromecast or Fire Stick first time.
Sign up free
Email and password. No credit card. You're inside the dashboard in 30 seconds.
Build your menu
Add categories, dishes, prices and photos. Or upload a PDF — Digisini extracts dishes and prices automatically.
Connect TV and print the table QR
Plug a Chromecast, Fire Stick or Android TV into any HDMI TV. Open player.digisini.com, link with a PIN. Print one QR sticker per table.
Update on the fly
Change prices, hide sold-out items, schedule menus by time of day. From your phone. Both the TV and the table QR stay in sync.
Start free,
upgrade when it pays
The Free plan covers 1 screen with a small Digisini watermark. Starter (€9/month) removes the watermark and adds email support. 14-day free trial on paid plans, no card required.
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A QR code is a great second menu
and a poor first one
Most guides sell the QR menu as a straight upgrade on paper. Four years after every restaurant tried it, the picture is more mixed — and knowing where it fails is what lets you use it where it works.
Some of your guests will not scan, and that is fine
A share of any dining room simply will not take a phone out: an older couple, someone whose battery is dead, a table of four who came out precisely to stop looking at screens. If the QR code is the only route to the menu, those tables now need a member of staff to read it out, which is slower than handing over a card would have been. The fix is not persuasion, it is keeping a handful of printed menus behind the bar. The QR then serves the majority who prefer it, and nobody is stuck.
Ordering starts before the phone unlocks
The measurable cost of a QR-only menu is the pause: scan, wait for the page, pinch to zoom, scroll past the starters to find the mains. That is thirty to sixty seconds during which nobody is deciding anything, repeated at every table. A screen on the wall does the opposite job — it works while people settle in, with no action required — which is why the two together beat either alone. Put the day's dishes and the drinks on the screen, and let the QR carry the full list, the allergens and the wine.
A PDF is the wrong file to put behind a code
The most common mistake is pointing the code at a PDF designed for A4 paper. On a phone it opens as an image you have to zoom into, it often weighs several megabytes, and on a busy night with everyone on the same connection it may not open at all. A plain web page with large text costs nothing to produce and loads on any signal. If the menu changes weekly, the difference matters twice: a page is edited in place, while a PDF has to be re-exported, re-uploaded and re-linked.
Who owns the link matters more than the design
Codes printed on tables, stickers and windows outlive whichever service generated them. If the code points at a third-party shortener or a trial account, the day that service changes its terms or the account lapses, every printed code in the room goes dead at once and there is no way to edit them. Point the code at a URL on your own domain and forward it internally. It costs nothing extra and it means you can change what sits behind it forever, without reprinting anything.
Calories and the service charge
are the two lines that decide how the menu reads
Neither is written by the restaurant. Calorie information has been required on menus for larger businesses since 2022 — including the online and delivery versions, not just the card on the table — and tips and service charges now sit under rules of their own about being passed on in full. Both land on the menu, and both are handled badly almost everywhere.
Calories first, because the threshold catches people out in both directions. Plenty of small restaurants assume it applies to them and spend a fortune having dishes analysed they never needed to; plenty of growing groups cross the line and carry on as before. It is worth knowing which side of it you are on before designing anything. And if you are on the side that must display them, a printed menu is close to unworkable — a changed supplier or a tweaked recipe means the figure is wrong until the next print run, whereas the same edit on a digital menu takes a minute and reaches the delivery listing too.
The service charge is the more interesting one, because it is where a sentence changes the mood of the whole bill. Diners have become sharply aware of where it goes, and vague wording now reads as evasion — «service charge» on its own invites the question, whereas saying plainly that it is discretionary and that it goes to the team in full answers it before it is asked. Restaurants worry that spelling out «discretionary» will cost them; in practice what costs them is a table that suspects and stops asking, then leaves nothing and does not come back.
Both belong next to the prices, not in a footer. A figure at the bottom of a page is read as small print, and small print is read as something the business would rather you skipped. Beside the dish, it is simply information — and this is the one advantage of a digital menu that has nothing to do with saving on printing: there is no bottom of the page, so nothing has to be relegated to it.
And it is worth checking that whatever you publish is the same everywhere. The card on the table, the QR page, the delivery app and the website drift apart quietly, and the version a customer holds you to is whichever one they read. Keeping one source and pointing everything at it is less about tidiness than about not having four menus of which three are out of date — which is the ordinary state of affairs in most kitchens by about the third month.
To be straight with you: we display what you upload and we do not calculate calories or check what applies to your business. Thresholds, exemptions and what your tipping policy must say are matters for your own advisers — the point here is only that these two lines are on your menu whether you designed them or not, and that they are far easier to keep true on a screen than on a card.
A code that will not scan
produces no error and no complaint
The guest holds the phone up, moves it closer, tries once more, and puts it away. They do not mention it — it is too small a thing to mention — and they order what they had last time. From inside the room, that evening looks completely normal.
You cannot detect this from behind the bar
There is no failed-scan report, nobody calls you over, and the till shows a perfectly ordinary night. The only symptom is indirect and easy to misread : staff being asked what is on the menu more often than the system was supposed to allow. When that happens the usual conclusion is «people prefer paper», which may be true and may equally be that the code has not worked properly for a month and nobody found a way to say so.
Test it with the worst phone in the building, after dark
Not your phone, in the afternoon, from twenty centimetres. Borrow the oldest handset among the staff and try it at the table, in the actual evening lighting, sitting down — which is when and how it will really be used. A code designed and approved at eleven in the morning on a new phone has been tested in the one condition that never occurs during service.
Two physical decisions break more codes than anything technical
A glossy laminate that mirrors the ceiling lights, and a code printed too small for the distance it is read from — a rough rule is that it needs roughly a tenth of that distance across, so a window code read from the pavement is far bigger than a table one. Both are settled in a minute at the printer, both are invisible when you check it yourself up close, and neither can be fixed later without reprinting everything.
And the fallback that costs one line
Print a short, typeable address under the code. It rescues precisely the people the code has already failed : the old phone, the cracked lens, the person who has never used a camera to scan anything and would rather not be seen learning. It also survives the code being scratched, covered by a napkin or worn away by cleaning — and it is the only part of this that keeps working when the sticker is three years old.
Questions about
QR menus for restaurants
Your QR menu live
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