QR menu for bars
that actually works

The code earns its place in the parts of a bar where nobody can be asked:

• The queue, and the doorway. People deciding whether to come in, or waiting to get served. Nobody is available to them and they have a free minute — this is where almost all real scans happen.
• Outside tables. The distance to the counter is exactly what makes a phone worth using, and it is also where the staff time saved is largest.
• The back room and the far end, in any place large enough that catching someone's eye takes effort.

This reframes what the linked page should contain. If the scan happens before ordering rather than instead of asking, the useful content is what people would otherwise ask about at the worst moment: what is on tap today, whether there is food after nine, what the wifi password is, whether you take cards.

There is a related decision that is easy to get backwards: the code should not be your only price list. At a busy bar a proportion of customers will not scan — hands full, no data, an older phone, or simply no interest — and they still need to be able to see what things cost. The code is an addition to a visible list, not a substitute for it.

Count how many people scan in a week and where they were standing when they did. In most bars the answer is that nearly all of them were waiting for something — and that tells you where the second code belongs and where the first one was wasted.

Three things worth deciding on purpose rather than by default:

• Whether ordering also means paying. If each round is paid on the spot, you have replaced a tab with a sequence of small decisions — and some of those will be no.
• Who is still coming to the table. The tab exists partly because someone walks over. Remove the walk and you remove the moment where a second round is suggested rather than requested.
• And what happens at the busiest hour. That is when a phone-based order helps most and when a shared tab gets hardest to keep straight. The two pull in opposite directions on the same night.

The point that decides it is simpler than the technology: a bar sells to a group, and a group orders in one voice. Anything that turns one order into five separate ones lowers the round size, even when every individual order is placed faster than before.

Which leaves a workable middle, and it is where most bars end up: the menu on the phone, the ordering at the table. People read what is on tonight without waiting, and the round is still asked for out loud by one person. The reading is what was slow; the ordering never was.

Before changing anything, count what an average tab holds. If it is more than two rounds, the tab is doing work — and whatever replaces it has to do that work too.

Nowhere does that matter more than allergens. A bar has to be able to give accurate allergen information for what it serves, and «ask a member of staff» is only a legitimate answer if the member of staff can actually answer. In a trade with high turnover and a new face on a Friday shift, that is a lot to ask of memory. A menu they can open in two seconds, that was updated when the kitchen changed the supplier, turns the hardest question of the night into a lookup — and it is the same link the customer scanned, so there is exactly one version of the truth in the building.

And the reason a printed sheet cannot hold this is not that it is old-fashioned: it is that ingredients change without anyone deciding to change them. A supplier switches a bun, a sauce is reformulated, the mayonnaise this week is a different brand because the usual one was out. None of those events feel like a reason to reprint anything, and all of them can change what is true on the allergen list. A wrong list is worse than no list, because it is relied on.

There is a second thing the staff copy fixes, and it is the one that shows up in takings: what is off. Nothing sours an order like being told, after choosing, that the thing chosen is finished — and in a bar that happens most on the busiest night, when nobody has time to walk round and tell everyone. One person marking it unavailable once, from the phone, means the next fifty people never see it and the answer at the bar is right without anyone having to remember.

Which sets the priority for what to put behind the code, and it is not the design. Accuracy first: what is on tonight, what is off, what is in it. Then price. Then, a long way behind, the photographs. A bar menu is read to settle a question, not to browse — and the version that settles questions correctly is worth more than the one that looks like a brochure, whether it is the customer reading it or the person they asked.

To be straight with you: we show what you upload and we do not hold recipes or supplier data. What you must be able to tell a customer about allergens, and what labelling applies to your business and its size, is a matter for your environmental health team and your own advisers — the point here is only that the answer has to be right at the moment it is asked, and that a printed sheet stopped being right the day the delivery changed.