Build a food business website — restaurant, café, bakery, catering

One design takes online food orders; five show your menu beautifully. Pick the right one first, then set hours, dishes and table QRs.

9 min readUpdated 30 Sep 2026

In this guide

Restaurant, café, bakery, sweet shop, catering, tiffin service. The first decision is bigger than the look: do you want people to order and pay online, or to see your menu and call you? One design does the first, five do the second beautifully, and picking the wrong one is the only real mistake available here. Not sure this is your family at all? Start at Which design is right for your business.

Is this you?

Restaurant · dhaba · family restaurant · fine dining · café and coffee shop · bakery · mithai and sweet shop · cloud kitchen · caterer · tiffin service. If you cook it and someone eats it, this is your guide.

The one decision: ordering, or a menu?

Take orders online

One design does this: Restaurant — Online Ordering.
Delivery, takeaway and dine-in by table QR, each its own switch.
Kitchen hours, a pause switch, meal timings, a billing counter and table reservations.
Orders land in your dashboard; the guest gets WhatsApp updates automatically.

Show the menu, take the call

Premium Restaurant, Restaurant Luxury, Brew & Crumb, Mithai & More, Royal Feast Caterers.
Your dishes with prices and photos, gallery, story, WhatsApp and call buttons.
Enquiries and table requests come to your Form Inbox and Bookings.
No cart, no checkout, nothing to run at 9pm on a Saturday.

Both are complete websites. The question is only whether you want to receive orders or receive calls.

Only Restaurant — Online Ordering runs the ordering engine. You can save restaurant settings on another design, but the menu ordering, dine-in QR, counter and kitchen controls take effect on that design. If online orders are the point, start there — the look is fully editable afterwards.

Pick your design

All six live under the Restaurant & Food card at Create New Website. Pick the closest look — every word, photo, colour and section changes afterwards in the editor.

Your place	Start with	Why that one
Any restaurant or café that wants online orders	Restaurant — Online Ordering	The only design with the ordering engine: dish cards with +/− quantity, veg/non-veg marks, time-based menus with serving-hour chips, table reservations with capacity checks, dine-in QR and the billing counter.
Restaurant, dhaba or food joint — menu and photos	Premium Restaurant	Parallax sections, a bento layout, a menu grouped into categories and a lightbox gallery.
Fine dining	Restaurant Luxury	Split-screen hero, grain texture, 3D card tilts and a wine-pairing section — a slower, richer page.
Café or coffee shop	Brew & Crumb	Filterable menu with dietary tags, a bean-sourcing story and an Instagram grid.
Bakery, sweet shop, mithai	Mithai & More	An Indian mithai menu with prices, festival banners, a custom-cake call-to-action and an FSSAI badge.
Caterer, tiffin service, food service	Royal Feast Caterers	Per-plate pricing packages, chef profiles, six service categories and a process timeline — written for enquiries, not carts.

A bakery that wants both — a pretty menu and online orders for cakes — should take Restaurant — Online Ordering and edit it to look like a bakery. Rewriting a page is easy; adding an ordering engine to a design that has none is not.

The Restaurant & Food card: designs built for menus, online ordering, table QR and reservations.

Keep these ready

Your menu with pricesCategory by category — Starters, Mains, Breads, Desserts

Photos of your best 8–10 dishesDaylight, plain table, shot from above or at 45°

Kitchen open and close timesOrdering switches itself off outside them

Your FSSAI licence numberPrints in your footer — customers and law both expect it

Your Maps linkFor the directions button and dine-in guests

Your first hour, in five steps

Business infoName, phone, address, FSSAI
Your dishesWith veg / non-veg marks
Turn ordering onAnd pick delivery / takeaway
Kitchen hoursSo 2am orders never arrive
Publish + table QRsPrint and stand them on the tables

Business info, including your FSSAI number

Settings → Business Info for name, phone, WhatsApp and address. The FSSAI licence goes in Restaurant → Settings → Compliance, along with your tax setup (restaurant GST at 5%, composition, or not registered) — and it prints in your website footer.

Add your dishes

Dishes are products with two extra controls: Food type (the veg / non-veg mark) and Serving time. Add your best sellers first with a photo and price; the long tail can be text-only. See Add & edit products.

Switch ordering on and choose how you serve

Restaurant → Settings → turn on Turn on online ordering, then pick Home delivery, Takeaway, or both. Nothing about ordering appears on your website until this switch is on — that is the master control. Full guide: Restaurant mode.

Set kitchen hours (and learn the pause button)

Ordering hours mean nobody can place an order at 2am that you will not see. Outside them the full menu still browses with a “we are currently closed” notice, and ordering comes back on its own. For a packed kitchen or a gas-cylinder emergency there is Pause new orders, which saves the instant you tap it.

Publish, then print your table QRs

If you have tables, add them under Tables & QR and print the cards — guests scan, see the live menu and order to their table. Test one with your own phone before the cards go out. See Table QR codes & dine-in.

Getting paid — and what it costs

Delivery and takeaway and dine-in are paid differently, and it is worth knowing which is which before you open:

Channel	How the guest pays
Home delivery	Cash on delivery, online through your gateway or UPI QR, or either — you choose in Restaurant → Restaurant settings → Payments. An online payment includes your delivery fee.
Takeaway	Online through your gateway or UPI QR, or at the counter when they collect.
Dine-in (table QR)	Normally settled at the counter, or online from the guest's phone if you prefer.
Counter / phone orders	The Billing Counter — tap dishes, take cash / UPI / card, print the GST bill.

A ₹600 online order on the Free plan

Guest pays: ₹600
Your delivery charge: included above
Platform fee on the sale: a small % — see Billing & plans
Counter and phone orders you type in: no platform fee
No order that day: ₹0

Paid plans take the per-sale fee to zero. The exact numbers for every plan are on your Plan page.

On the Free plan an online order costs 2.5% of the sale from your credits; Pro and Growth are 0%. Your delivery fee is worked out on our servers, never on the guest's phone. With a fee by distance, every delivery is charged your first distance until the checkout can measure each customer's distance — and that needs your shop's location. Until it is set, your Overview and your Restaurant page show a Set your shop's location card: tap Set on map, search your shop's name, put the pin on your door and save. (It is also in the sidebar under Delivery → Delivery fee & area.) The checkout then asks every customer for their location.

What makes someone order from you instead of the app

Do this

Photos of your actual dishes — the app photos are not yours to use
Veg / non-veg marks on everything; many customers filter on nothing else
Honest kitchen hours, and the pause switch when you are slammed
Mark a dish unavailable the moment it runs out — it disappears from every table instantly
One line in your bill and on your board: “order direct, no commission”

Not this

A PDF menu — nobody pinches to zoom on a phone twice
Leaving yesterday's sold-out dish on the menu
Taking delivery orders outside the area your rider can actually reach
Printing a table QR before you have placed one test order yourself
Turning on delivery, takeaway and dine-in on day one — start with the one you already do

Example · Bawarchi, a 14-table family restaurant

Friday evenings used to lose orders because two servers could not reach every table. They printed one QR card per table, kept the menu live, and now guests order the moment they sit down — the kitchen sees the ticket with the table number on it, and the servers carry food instead of notepads. Table time dropped, so the same 14 tables turn more covers.

After you are live

You want to…	Read
Run ordering, hours, delivery fees and reservations	Restaurant mode
Put a QR on every table	Table QR codes & dine-in
Bill walk-ins at POS speed and print kitchen tickets	Billing Counter
Work the day's orders	Managing orders
Take table bookings	Appointments & bookings
Be found for “restaurant near me”	Get found on Google
Bring regulars back	Loyalty points · Coupons
Close for a festival without going offline	Pause ordering

Common questions

I picked a menu design and now I want online orders. What happens?

Restaurant settings will save, but the ordering, dine-in and counter features run on the Restaurant — Online Ordering design. Create a new website on that design (it costs nothing) and copy your menu across. This is the one case where starting again is genuinely faster.

Can delivery customers pay online?

Yes. In Restaurant → Restaurant settings → Payments you choose cash on delivery, online payment, or both for home delivery — an online payment includes your delivery fee. Takeaway and dine-in have their own payment switches on the same tab.

Can I show a breakfast menu only in the morning?

Yes. Menu timings let you attach serving hours to a category — idli in the morning, biryani at lunch — and a single dish can override its category (all-day filter coffee inside a breakfast-only section). Out-of-hours dishes can never be ordered.

Do I need a printer for the billing counter?

Not to start. The counter works on a phone or computer without one; add a small Bluetooth thermal printer when you want bills and kitchen tickets printing in about a second.

I have two outlets. One website or two?

One. Add each outlet under Restaurant → Outlets with its own hours and phone; customers pick their nearest one and orders carry that outlet's name. Tables belong to a branch too, so each outlet prints its own QR codes.