How to run a menu in every language that your staff update from their phones

A restaurant that serves visitors keeps the same menu in three or four languages. On paper, or as PDFs behind a QR code, every price change means editing each language and printing or uploading it again. A new dish waits until someone translates it, and when the salmon runs out the waiters say so table by table. Here is the same menu kept as one table, with a page per language that guests open from the table and a phone in every waiter’s pocket to keep it right. The screens in the film above are the app itself, from the workspace I built for this post.

What you will have

• One Dishes table: each dish written once, its translations beside it, and one price.
• A public menu page per language, at a link that never changes, so the QR code you print stays good.
• A button on every menu to each other language.
• Sold out in two taps: a waiter marks a dish on their phone, and every guest who opens a menu after that no longer sees it, in any language.
• A record of who changed each dish last, and when.

Step 1. Make the Dishes table

Ask your assistant for it, or click it together in the app. These are the fields:

Make a Dishes table with Name, Category (Starters, Mains, Desserts, Drinks), Price in euros, Description, and an Available checkbox that starts ticked. Here is our menu.

Attach your current menu or paste it into the conversation, and the assistant adds the dishes. You can also import a spreadsheet in the app (xlsx, csv or tsv).

Step 2. Let the assistant translate

Translate every dish into German, French and Italian.

It adds a Name and a Description field for each language, Name (DE), Description (DE) and so on, and fills them in. Names people know stay as they are: burrata is Burrata on every menu. Have someone who reads each language go through it once, and correct a word as you would any cell.

When you add dishes later, in your own language:

Translate the dishes that have no German, French or Italian name yet.

Step 3. Publish a menu page per language

Make a public menu page in each language. Under a heading for each course, list the dishes of that course whose Available is ticked, with their name, description and price in that language. Put a button to each other language at the top.

Each page is a list per course that shows only the dishes where Category is that course and Available is checked. The assistant writes the headings in each language (Vorspeisen, Entrées, Antipasti), and you can change any of it by clicking in the page editor.

A page shows the fields you put on it, so each language is a page of its own, with its own address: app.sterodata.com/bistro-9/menu, …/speisekarte, …/la-carte, …/il-menu. The address is made from the page’s name when it is created and never changes, even if you rename the page later. On a phone, the buttons to the other languages sit under More.

Step 4. Put the QR code on the tables

Turn the address of the menu most of your guests read into a QR code with any QR code generator; Sterodata does not make them. Print it on the table card, and guests who read another language switch with the buttons. If you prefer, print one code per language, each labelled in its own language. Because the addresses never change, you print them once.

Step 5. Put the menu on your staff’s phones

Invite each person to the workspace. On their phone they open app.sterodata.com in the browser and sign in, and Add to Home Screen gives it an icon like any other app. There is nothing to install from an app store: it is the same Sterodata, laid out for a phone.

On a phone, tapping a dish opens it full screen. To mark it sold out, tap the tick beside Available and choose No. It is saved at once; there is no Save button.

Step 6. Decide who can change what

Give the floor staff a view of Dishes rather than the table: one that includes Name, Category and Available, with Changes allowed set to Update, shared with a Waiters role. A role that has only the view can change only what the view includes, so prices and translations stay with you and your manager.

Day to day

Who sees what

• Guests see the menu pages and nothing else: the ticked dishes, with only the fields each page shows. They need no account, and nothing else in the workspace can be reached from a menu.
• Waiters work in their view: what is available, and nothing more.
• You keep prices, translations and everything else. Every dish shows who changed it last and when (Updated by, Updated at), so you can tell who took the salmon off, and at what time.

Good to know

• A menu that is already open on a guest’s phone does not change by itself. The guest sees the change the next time they open the menu or refresh it.
• The page’s own few words, like More, follow your workspace’s language. Everything you write (headings, dish names, the word under each course) is in the page’s language.
• Each new language is two more fields and one more page. Ask the assistant for both.
• Want photos? Add an Attachment field, and a menu can show each dish as a card with its picture.