Making a restaurant menu readable for AI: every dish, its labels and its price, in text

Why the menu page decides the diet questions

A guest asking for "a restaurant with a real vegan main course" is asking about a line on a menu. An answer can say yes only if a page it read says so, beside the dish, in words. Our audit of 9,483 small business websites found 2.1% keeping their real content, a price list or a service menu, in a PDF, and a menu in an image is further out of reach still: a picture of words is not words. The restaurants overview covers the rest of what a restaurant's site states; this article is the menu.

What each dish line states

The label has to be a word beside the dish. A leaf icon with no word next to it is a picture, and it tells nothing reading the text that the dish is vegetarian. Define each label once, at the top of the menu, in the terms your kitchen uses: what vegan means on your menu, and what "made without gluten ingredients" does and does not promise.

Several menus, one site

Most restaurants run more than one menu: lunch and dinner, brunch on weekends, a set menu, a tasting menu, a children's menu, a wine list. Give each its own page or its own headed section, and say at the top when it is served, by day and hour. A guest asking where to eat on Sunday at noon needs to know the brunch menu exists and when it stops.

• Name each menu as the restaurant does, and state its serving times in the first line under its heading.
• Give set and tasting menus a price per person and what is included, courses and any pairing.
• Say how a market-price dish is priced, and where the day's price is shown.
• Keep the children's menu with ages or sizes, if you set any.
• Put the wine list in text too; guests ask about it, and a file is where it usually hides.

Dietary labels and allergens

Treat dietary labels and allergen information as two different things. A label says what a dish is, in the kitchen's own words. Allergen questions are about a particular guest's safety, and the page should send them to people: one line at the end of every menu such as "Our kitchen handles [allergens]. If you have an allergy, tell your server before you order." That sentence can be passed on to a guest by an answer; a promise the kitchen cannot keep should not be on the page at all.

The rules on which allergens must be declared, and how, differ by jurisdiction, and this page states none of them. Your local food authority is the place to ask. What the page can always carry is the honest description, the label as your kitchen defines it, and the line that routes allergy questions to staff.

When the menu changes every week

1. Keep one source for the menu, a spreadsheet or the point-of-sale export, and make the website, the printed menu and every delivery app copy from it.
2. Put the dishes that stay on the menu in the standing sections, and the week's dishes in a dated section of their own.
3. Change the date at the top of the menu page every time it changes.
4. Take the old version down the same day: last season's PDF, a menu page nobody links to, an app listing that still shows it.
5. Check the delivery apps' copies the same day, because a guest may read any of them.

A menu that changes weekly is easier to keep true on a web page than in a PDF, because a page can be edited in place and a PDF gets replaced by a second PDF with a slightly different name. Keeping a restaurant's data the same everywhere covers the other copies.

The markup, briefly

Schema.org's Restaurant type takes hasMenu, which can list several Menu nodes, one per menu, each with MenuSection and MenuItem nodes carrying an Offer with a price and a priceCurrency, and suitableForDiet where your label claims exactly what the value says. Write it in JSON-LD, with every value copied from the page. A café menu machines can read has a full template of the same types; for a restaurant, repeat its Menu block once per menu and name each one.

Markup restates the page and adds nothing to it. Google's structured data guidelines require markup that describes the visible page and does not mislead, so a dish in the markup that is not on the menu page should not be there.