You export the menu as a PDF, generate a QR code that points at it, and stick the code on the tables. It works — a guest scans and sees the menu. So far, so good.
The problem is what happens away from the table. Someone who has not chosen where to eat yet searches, or asks an assistant. In both cases your menu is not part of the conversation.
What a search engine actually sees
Google does index PDFs — that much is true, and it gets quoted as though it settles the matter. But it indexes them as documents: it pulls out a title, some text, and stops.
The difference is between "this file exists" and "this restaurant serves carbonara at £14, no nuts, until 11pm daily". The second is information an engine can answer a question with. A PDF does not carry it in a machine-readable form — even when the letters are right there.
And if your menu was scanned or exported as an image, even the letters are gone. What is left is a several-megabyte file that means nothing to a machine.
What the guest loses
Search aside, a PDF is a poor thing to hand a phone. It opens in a separate viewer, the page is A4 on a screen that is not, and every guest's first gesture is to pinch.
A menu that is readable on arrival is not a cosmetic improvement. It is the difference between a guest who browses the whole list and a guest who orders the first thing they managed to read.
What a readable menu looks like
Three things, in this order:
- Its own URL. The menu is a page —
yourrestaurant.com/menu— not a file. A page can be linked, shared, indexed and updated. - Real HTML text. Dish names, descriptions, prices and allergens are text in the page, not pixels in a picture.
- Schema.org markup.
Restaurant,Menu,MenuItemandOffertell a crawler which part is a dish and which part is a price, instead of leaving it to guess.
The third is what opens up results for a specific dish rather than only for the name of the place.
A menu is not a file you hand out. It is the page people find you on.
And then there is updating it
There is a more mundane reason too. You run out of something. With a PDF: open the document, edit, export, upload, wait for the cache, and the old file carries on living in somebody's phone.
With a page: change the item's status, and the next person to open the menu sees it. The QR code on the table never changes, because it points at an address rather than at a file.
Menugram does exactly this — a branded menu on its own URL, readable by Google and by your guests, that you update yourself.
If you are working out how to lay yours out, look at a live menu and then how the platform works.