Building your menu

#Categories

Menu → Categories. Categories are how customers browse, so name them the way a diner thinks: Breakfast, Grills, Cold drinks — not SKU group B.

Each category has:

• Sort order — the position it appears in on your storefront.
• Item sort — how items inside it are ordered. Most relevant lets Restro promote what sells; the alternatives sort manually or alphabetically.
• Availability schedule — optional per-day time windows. A Breakfast category set to 07:00–11:30 simply is not there at dinner.

#Items

Menu → Items → Add item. An item needs a title and a price on at least one branch. Everything else is optional but most of it earns its keep:

• Description — shown on the item sheet in your storefront and app.
• Image — the single biggest lever on conversion. Use one.
• Labels — dietary and descriptive tags (vegan, spicy, new).
• Nutrition facts — displayed to customers where you provide them.
• Allow special requests — lets customers type a free-text note on this item. Turn it off for anything the kitchen cannot vary.
• Barcode — the code printed on a packaged item. Scanning it on a desktop till adds the item straight to the ticket.

#Pricing per branch

Prices live on the branch, not on the item. A dish can be 90 in the mall branch and 75 downtown, and each branch can carry its own VAT rate.

The listed switch on a branch price controls whether that branch sells the item at all. Unlisting is how you keep a seasonal dish off one branch's menu without deleting it everywhere.

If you price every branch the same, use Apply to all branches when editing and Restro fills them in for you.

#Customizations

Customizations are option groups attached to an item — Size, Spice level, Add-ons.

• Single choice groups act as radio buttons.
• Multiple choice groups act as checkboxes.
• Options can carry a price delta, and that delta can be overridden per branch just like the base price.

Mark a group required when the kitchen cannot cook without an answer.

#Availability

Two separate mechanisms, often confused:

Published is the permanent switch. An unpublished item is invisible everywhere.

Unavailable until is the temporary snooze. Pick a time up to 30 days out, give a reason — sold out, ingredients, equipment, other — and the item greys out on the storefront with that reason until the clock runs out. This is the one you want at 8pm when the lamb runs out.

There is also auto-unavailable on low stock: switch it on and Restro hides the item automatically when its recipe ingredients drop below what one serving needs.

#Importing an existing menu

Menu → Import. Upload a spreadsheet and map the columns to categories, items, prices, and descriptions. Restro previews the result and reports rows it could not read before anything is written, so a bad file costs you nothing.