A restaurant or bar website: what guests check first

What does a guest check before coming?

Five things: the menu with prices, what the place looks like inside, whether it is open tonight, where it is and how to book or call. Guests check them on a phone, and when one answer is missing, the next place in the search results is a tap away.

The menu comes first for many of them. In a survey of 850 U.S. adults that Toast ran in September 2024, 25% said they always check a restaurant’s menu before deciding where to eat, and another 34% said they often do.

A restaurant website is the page a guest opens before choosing where to spend the evening: the menu with prices, real photos of the room, today’s hours, the address and a way to book, all readable on a phone. A bar or a café needs the same page; only the menu changes.

Below we go through those five answers on one real example, the site we built for Velvet Panda Lounge, a lounge bar whose site went live in July 2026. The rules for any small business site, such as prices, messengers next to the form and several languages, are in what a small business website needs in 2026. Here we keep to what a bar, café or restaurant needs on top of them.

Aren’t social media and a map listing enough?

They help guests find you, but they rarely give all five answers in one place. That was where the lounge started. Lounge bars often live on social media and map listings, where the menu is a photo of a printed card, the opening hours sit in an old post, and the atmosphere, the thing people actually come for, barely comes across.

Guests still pick where to spend the evening on their phone. A site of your own puts every answer on one page that you control, and you link to it from your profile and your listing. Social media keeps bringing people in, and the site is where they land when they want the details.

How should the menu look on the site?

As text on the page, with a price next to each item, not as a PDF or a photo of the printed card. A PDF opens somewhere else, its type is tiny on a phone, and the guest has to pinch and drag to read a single line.

Diners notice. In Popmenu’s April 2023 survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers about ordering food online, 49% said they would move on and order from a different restaurant if they hit a PDF menu on a phone, up from 30% two years earlier.

The Velvet Panda menu is four cards with prices. The cards are part of the page, so they scroll with everything else and read on a phone as easily as on a laptop. Because the prices are right there, a guest knows what the evening will cost before leaving home, and that is the change the owner noticed:

I asked for it to look expensive and was afraid of getting gold letters on a black background. Now people check the menu before they come, not at the table.

Owner of a lounge bar · Website

A long restaurant menu works the same way. Split it into sections a guest can jump between, and keep each price in the same place on every line, so the eye finds it without searching.

How do you show the mood of the place?

With real photos of your room and a design that feels like the evening you sell. Stock photos of smiling strangers tell a guest nothing about your place. Your own interior, light and tables tell them almost everything.

The owner of the lounge asked us to make it look expensive. The site is one long page that works like walking in: a full-height hookah stands beside the text, and as you scroll the “camera” pans down it, with three layers of slow smoke on top. Further down comes a gallery of the real interior, photos of the lounge itself, used with permission.

Movement like this has to stay light. Scrolling stays smooth on phones, and a guest who has turned animations off in their device settings gets a calm page without the smoke and the panning. The mood comes across either way.

Is the place open right now?

The site should tell the guest in one line, without making them work out the day and the time. A table of hours does half the job. The other half is a line that says “open now” or tells the guest when you open next.

On the lounge site the hours are live. Today’s row is highlighted, and a status line says whether the lounge is open right now or when it opens next, including the Friday and Saturday nights that run past midnight. Those late nights are where a plain table trips people up: at one in the morning it is already Saturday on the calendar, but the bar is still in its Friday night.

For the version in our portfolio we also made the status follow the venue’s own time zone instead of the visitor’s, so a guest whose phone is still on another clock sees the right answer. And nobody has to post “open late tonight”: the status works it out from the weekly hours.

Where is it, and how does a guest book?

Put a map, the contacts and a way to book on the same page as the menu, so a guest never has to copy an address into another app. The lounge site ends with a map and contacts, and a guest can call or get directions without leaving the page.

How a guest books depends on how you take bookings. If you take them by phone, make the number a link that starts the call. If you would rather have them in writing, a short form can send each request straight to your Telegram, or the button can lead to the booking service you already use. If your guests already write to you in Telegram, table requests can also go through a Telegram bot.

Which mistakes send guests somewhere else?

A PDF menu, missing prices, stale hours, a page that only works on a computer, stock photos and a hidden address: each one leaves a guest without one of the five answers. Here they are next to what the lounge site does instead:

Each fix is small on its own. What matters is having all six at once, because one dead end is enough for a guest to choose another bar.

What should the site do for the owner?

Bring in guests who already know what to expect, and answer the routine questions so your staff don’t have to. A guest who has seen the room, the menu and the prices chose you knowing all three, and every answer on the page is one less “are you open tonight?” message during service.

It also has to look like your place. The lounge owner wanted it to look expensive without the clichés, and got a dark site where the hookah, the smoke and the real interior set the tone. A café would get a different page: the same five answers, in its own light.

And it should be easy to keep current. On the lounge site the “open now” status works itself out from the weekly hours. If you change the menu every season, ask for an admin panel so you can edit dishes and prices yourself.

How much does a restaurant website cost?

Our websites start from $250 and take from 1 week. The price moves with the number of pages and languages, an admin panel for editing the menu yourself, texts, photos and translation, and integrations such as a booking service.

The first call and the written scope are free. We name the price once the work is agreed and counted; it is fixed before work starts and changes only if the scope changes. You click through a working version before the bulk of the work, and the person who scopes your site builds it. We work remotely from Batumi, Georgia, in English or Russian, and how we scope a project walks through each step.

Questions

Sources

1. Toast: How Guests Really Feel About QR Code Menus (survey of 850 U.S. adults, September 2024)
2. Popmenu: 6 Things Diners Wish Restaurant Owners Knew About Online Ordering (survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, April 2023)

Alexander ZabrodinCEO · Founder

ZabSoft is a software company in Batumi. The person who scopes your project is the person who builds it.