Built for the kitchen, not the IT department.
We started MenuPublish because we kept watching the same scene play out: a chef rewrites the menu, a server prints a new copy, and the website falls a week behind. We thought it should take thirty seconds.
The problem we saw
Restaurant menus change all the time — seasonal dishes, market price fish, a Tuesday corkage promo, a new mocktail because the chef finally got the syrup right. The kitchen moves at kitchen speed. The website doesn’t. The result is a quiet little failure that compounds: stale menus on Google, the 404’d brunch.pdffrom 2019, the line cook telling diners “ignore the website, that’s not what we have today.”
The tools that exist either ask the chef to learn a CMS, or ask the web agency to retype every dish into WordPress every Friday afternoon. Both options waste the time of the people you actually wanted to hire.
What we’re building
MenuPublish is a single, stupid idea executed carefully: take a photo of the menu, send it however you want — text, email, drag-and-drop — and let us turn it into structured, searchable, ADA-compliant content on your existing website. Typed menus, handwritten chalkboards, PDFs someone exported once in 2018: all the same input.
We extract every dish, price, section, and modifier. We hand the result back as clean data that publishes to WordPress, Squarespace, a static site, or wherever you already live online. No new dashboard to learn. No yet another login.
What we believe
- Chefs shouldn’t learn CMSes. The friction should be on us, not on the person who can break down a 30lb striped bass before service.
- Agencies shouldn’t retype menus.If your client’s menu changes weekly and the only update path is you-doing-data-entry, the relationship is broken.
- Structured data wins.A menu that lives as a PDF is invisible to Google, screen readers, and translation tools. A menu that lives as data shows up everywhere it’s asked for.
- Photos are good enough.Modern OCR and language models can read a smudged paper menu more reliably than most CMS importers. We’d rather start where the kitchen already is.
Where we are
MenuPublish is in active development. If you’re a restaurant owner, GM, or agency owner and the above sounds like a thing you want to exist, the fastest way to help is to try the demo and tell us what we got wrong.