Get your menu off the PDF
A PDF opens sideways, a photograph of the board has no words in it, and both are wrong the week after you print them.
A real Clay site — built from a Google listing
The most opened page on any restaurant website is the menu, and on most of them it is a file: an A4 document exported once, living at an address that ends in menu-final-v3.pdf. A guest taps it, their phone opens it sideways at about a third of readable size, and they pinch their way around a page that was drawn for paper.
Putting a menu online properly means one thing, and everything else follows from it: the dishes and the prices are text on the page, not a picture of text and not a file next to the page. Then it reads on a phone without zooming, it can be read aloud, a search engine can read it as a menu rather than as a document, and you can change it in the ten minutes before service.
A document, not a page
A PDF has a fixed width, and that width is A4. On a 390-pixel screen every guest at the table does the same two-finger dance before they find the vegetarian starters. Some phones open it in the browser, some hand it to a viewer app, and a few download it and leave somebody wondering where it went.
The slower problem is that a file is a copy. When your prices go up, the old one is still sitting in the QR code you printed in March, in the aggregator you uploaded it to and in the email you sent the local paper — each a menu with your name on it and last year's numbers.
And a PDF is not a menu to a search engine. It may well be indexed as a document, but the dishes inside it are not on your page, they carry no prices anything can read, and none of it counts as menu content on the site somebody actually searched for.
A photograph has no text
The other common answer is a picture of the board, taken at an angle, with the light from the window across the bottom third. It is fast, and honest about what you are serving today. It is also, to everything but a human eye, a blank page: nothing to search, and no price a machine can read.
Clay will at least read it for you. The model that looks at your Google photographs transcribes a menu board when it finds one, up to forty rows, and marks the result for you to check. That saves the typing. It is not a price list anybody should trust until you have read it.
The weekly menu
A kitchen that writes a new menu every Monday is the one a PDF punishes most: the design file, the export, the upload, and the old version still sitting in four places. On a page there is one place. You tap the menu on your own site, change the rows, and it saves itself as you go.
Courses carry their own serving hours, so "Breakfast, until 11:30" is a fact about the group rather than a line somebody has to remember to delete at noon. What is not there is scheduling: nothing swaps Monday's menu in for you overnight, so the change is still a job for Monday morning.
What a menu page carries
How the first version fills itself in
Marked up as a menu
Dishes go out as schema.org Menu, MenuSection and MenuItem with priced offers — the shape a search engine reads, and the one a PDF hides.
Read off your own site
If your current site already publishes its menu as structured data, Clay takes it — your dishes, your words, your prices, copied and never converted.
Read off your board
No website, but a photograph of the board in your listing? That gets transcribed instead — forty rows at most, flagged for you to check.
Named by your reviewers
A dish three or more reviews keep naming can seed a row, most-named first, with the sentence they said it in and no invented price.
Real sites, made with Clay
Open one. It is the live site in a frame, not a screenshot — so what you see is what it looks like right now.
Questions
Should I keep the PDF as well?
You can link one and some kitchens do, for the person who wants to print it. It should not be the menu, though — a linked file is a second copy that goes stale on its own. Point the code on the table at the page instead: a QR code menu never has to be reprinted when a price moves.
Can I mark a dish as sold out?
No. A menu row has no stock field of any kind, so on a busy Saturday you either edit the row out and put it back later, or say it at the table. Sold-out switches belong to shop products, not to dishes. It is the one place a chalkboard still genuinely wins.
My menu changes weekly. Is this more work than exporting a PDF?
Less, but it is still typing. You edit the rows on your own page from your phone and it saves as you go — no export, no upload, no old file left behind anywhere. There is no scheduling, though: nothing swaps a menu over at midnight, so a Monday menu is Monday morning's job.
Can I put allergens on each dish?
Not as a proper field. A dish carries up to eight short tags you type yourself, and the first of them is used as its course — so a dietary mark is a word with no vocabulary behind it and nothing checking it. For anything a guest's health depends on, the answer is still a conversation.
Can people order from the menu?
No. Nothing on a menu row is orderable — no add button, no basket. Selling is a different band: a shop has products, options and a basket, and the order is handed to your WhatsApp or your inbox rather than charged on the page. The menu is for reading.
Search your business, and read your own menu back
Clay builds the site from your Google listing first — photographs, hours, reviews, map — and the menu comes off your own site or your own board. You correct it from the page.