Documentation
How to use Digital Menu for Restaurants
Everything from setting up your first category to placing the menu on a page. If you get stuck, the support forum is linked at the bottom of this page.
Quick start
The order that gets you to a working menu fastest.
- Activate the plugin — Plugins → Add New → search “Digital Menu for Restaurants” → Install → Activate.
- Add your categories — Digital Menu → Categories. Starters, Mains, Drinks… one level of sub-categories is allowed.
- Check the allergens — Digital Menu → Allergens. The 14 EU allergens are already there — nothing to set up.
- Add diet tags, if you need them — Digital Menu → Diets. Vegan, no pork, whatever your kitchen tracks — optional.
- Add your dishes — Digital Menu → Products, one at a time, or all at once with the CSV importer.
- Place the menu and pick a look — add
[digital_menu]to a page, then choose a theme under Settings → Appearance.
Categories
Categories group your dishes — Starters, Mains, Desserts. Each category can have one level of sub-categories (e.g. Drinks → Wine, Drinks → Beer), reordered with the ▲▼ buttons rather than typed-in numbers.
Deleting a category with dishes in it
You’ll be asked whether to delete those dishes too, or move them to another category instead — nothing is removed silently.
Allergens
The 14 allergens required by EU Regulation 1169/2011 are pre-loaded and fixed — they can’t be added to, removed, or renamed, so your menu can’t accidentally fall out of compliance. The only thing you can change is the emoji shown next to each one.
Mark the allergens a dish contains on the product’s own edit screen — see “Products” below.
Diet tags
Diet tags are yours to define — anything the 14 fixed allergens don’t cover: pork, alcohol, spicy, vegan, vegetarian. Digital Menu → Diets → Add new.
- Hide dishes that have it — for things diners avoid, like “Pork” or “Alcohol”. Selecting the tag on the menu hides matching dishes.
- Show only dishes that have it — for things diners are looking for, like “Vegan” or “Vegetarian”. Selecting the tag hides everything except matching dishes.
Products
Digital Menu → Products → Add new. Each dish has a name, description, category, and:
- Up to two prices — each with its own label (“Full portion” / “Half portion”, “Glass” / “Bottle”). Leave one empty to hide it.
- Allergens & diets — tick every allergen the dish contains, and any diet tags that apply.
- Featured — adds the dish to the “★ Recommended” section at the top of the menu.
- Active — turn a dish off temporarily (out of season, sold out) without deleting it.
Importing from a spreadsheet
Digital Menu → Import / Export. Download the template, fill it in (only name and category are required), and upload it.
- Pick a mode — add new dishes only, add and update existing ones, or replace the whole menu.
- Preview before anything saves — see exactly what’s new, updated, skipped, or in error, and any allergen spelling that got auto-corrected.
- Confirm — nothing is written to your menu until you approve the preview.
Showing the menu on your site
Add this to any page or post — in a Shortcode block, or directly in Classic editor content:
[[digital_menu]]Choosing a look
Digital Menu → Settings → Appearance. Pick one of four fixed themes — Bistro, Fine Dining, Modern, Minimal — or switch to Custom for full control: colours, fonts, text size, layout, card style, and a header image. The Custom CSS box at the bottom takes it further, if you need it.
Why colours never look “off”
Every colour, background and border in the menu is deliberately isolated from your active theme’s own styling — it never inherits a stray button colour or font by accident, whichever theme your site uses.
Troubleshooting
The menu doesn’t show up on my page
Check the shortcode is spelled exactly [digital_menu], on a published page, and that the page isn’t cached from before you added it.
I changed the theme, but the front end still looks like the old one
Hard-refresh the page (Ctrl+Shift+R / Cmd+Shift+R). If you use a caching plugin, clear its cache too.
An allergen I expected isn’t in the front-end filter
The filter only lists allergens actually used somewhere in your menu — it’s not missing, it’s just not present on any dish yet.
Can I remove or rename one of the 14 allergens?
No — they’re fixed by EU law so the list can’t fall out of compliance. Only the emoji next to each one is yours to change.
Didn’t find what you needed?
The WordPress.org support forum is community-run and free — search first, most questions are already answered. Include your WordPress and PHP version when you ask.