LimeOrigin for restaurants
Most restaurant websites go out of date within a season — not because anybody stopped caring, but because updating one costs an evening nobody has. LimeOrigin is built for the part that comes after launch: one link that never changes, hours you set once, and a new menu you can upload and check rather than retype.
You do not have to type your dishes into anything. A PDF menu is a complete answer on its own: it gets a permanent address, printed codes point at it, you replace it when it changes, and every previous version is kept.
Building the menu properly — dishes, sections, prices, allergens — buys you things a PDF cannot do: search engines that understand what you serve, a menu that reads well on a phone, and prices you can change from the kitchen in a minute. It is a choice, and you can make it later, or never.
Both paths, fully supported
A year of it
None of this is a separate product to buy or a plugin to keep alive. It is one account, one bill, and the same website all year.
In week one
Your menu — the PDF you already have, or a menu you build here — is published at one permanent link. Put it on the flyers, in your Google listing, on the window. It is the last time you have to change any of them.
Permanent Links →Before the print run
Make a scannable code for that address and download it ready for a print shop. Name each one — table tent, window, flyer — so you can see which is actually used before printing more. Because they point at the address rather than the file, replacing the menu never breaks a code.
Smart codes →Once, and then never again
Your usual week, the bank holidays, the fortnight you close in January. Set them once and your website, your structured data and your booking form all read the same answer — so they cannot drift apart while you are busy.
Menus & Opening Hours →In November
Build the festive menu, the new photographs and the changed hours now, group them together, and give the group a date. It goes live at opening on the first and takes itself down after Twelfth Night, with nothing to remember on either day.
Scheduling & Campaigns →Before it is public
Look at your website exactly as it will look on the day, and send that view to a business partner or a manager. They can read it without an account and without being able to change anything.
Preview and approval →In March, when prices move
Send the new menu to your printer, then upload the same file here. You get a short list of what is different — not forty dishes to check by eye — and nothing on your website changes until you approve it.
Menu Import →Whenever it matters
Burst pipe, early close, kitchen closed for a wedding. Put a notice up, give it an end time, and it takes itself down — so the website is not still apologising on Thursday for something that happened on Monday.
Notices →Quietly, in the background
“This menu was last confirmed against a document seven months ago.” “A newer document has been read and nobody has reviewed it.” Facts about what actually happened, so nothing rots without somebody being told.
Freshness →What a menu update looks like
Upload the new PDF and you are shown what is different against the menu you already have. A dish that has only been reworded is not a change you need to think about. A price or an allergen is.
When the menu has been redesigned but the food is the same, it says so — “No material menu-content changes detected” — rather than handing you forty differences that are really one new typeface.
The menu below is an illustration, not a real restaurant. LimeOrigin does not publish accuracy figures, because it does not measure one — what it does instead is ask you when it is not sure, and change nothing until you approve it.
Example — an illustration, not a real customer
Sea bass — £19.50, was £17.95
Price and what is on saleA price you will want to read
Mushroom risotto — now marked as containing dairy
Allergen and dietary informationRead this one on its own
Salt-baked celeriac — new dish
Price and what is on saleNot on your website yet
Pea and ham soup — no longer on the document
Price and what is on saleGone from the printed menu
“Pan-fried sea bass” is now “Sea bass, pan-fried”
Wording and layoutSame dish, new wording
You can accept the wording changes together. The prices and the allergen still come to you one at a time.
When it cannot read your file
LimeOrigin reads menus made on a computer, where the words are really inside the file. A photograph or a scan is a picture of a menu — reading one would mean inventing your dishes and your prices, and we would rather tell you the truth:
“This looks like a scan or an image, so there is no text for us to read. Your PDF menu is published and working as it is.”
Nothing on your website changes, and the PDF menu at your permanent link carries on working exactly as it was. An honest “no” costs you a minute. A confident guess about an allergen costs a great deal more.
Upload the PDF, get a permanent link and a code for the tables, and build the rest when you feel like it. Start free.