A ghost kitchen - also called a dark kitchen or virtual restaurant - operates without a dining room. There are no tables, no front-of-house staff, and often no walk-in customers. Orders come in through delivery platforms, a direct ordering website, or both. Food goes out through delivery drivers or pickup.

The menu question is different here than for a traditional restaurant. You're not designing for a guest sitting at a table - you're designing for someone scrolling through a delivery app or your website, usually on a phone, often hungry, making a quick decision.

Here's what that means in practice.

Your menu exists in multiple places simultaneously

A traditional restaurant has one menu. A ghost kitchen typically has its menu in several places:

  • Delivery platforms (Uber Eats, DoorDash, etc.) - each with their own format and interface
  • Your own ordering page - if you have one
  • Your website or social media - so potential customers can browse before deciding to order
  • Possibly a QR code - if you have a pickup window or partner with a café that serves your food

Each platform has its own constraints. Delivery apps control how your menu looks - you add items, descriptions, and photos, but the layout is theirs. Your own ordering page gives you more control.

What delivery app menus can't do

Delivery platforms optimise their interfaces for their own conversion, not yours. You can't control font, colour, category layout, or much else. What you can control:

  • Item names - make them clear and descriptive, not clever
  • Descriptions - accurate, concise, covering the key decision-making information (size, main ingredients, spice level)
  • Photos - this is your biggest lever on a delivery app; high-quality photos dramatically increase order rates
  • Categories - logical groupings that help guests navigate quickly
  • Modifiers - customisation options (sizes, add-ons, removals)

Put your effort into photos and descriptions. They're the variables that move numbers.

Why you still need a menu outside the delivery apps

Delivery platforms take 15-30% commission on every order. That's a significant cost. Many ghost kitchens try to shift some order volume to direct channels - their own website, Instagram, WhatsApp, or a direct ordering tool.

For this, you need a menu that exists outside the delivery apps. This is where a digital menu platform comes in - not as a replacement for delivery, but as a destination for customers you've acquired through other channels (social media, loyalty, word of mouth) who you'd prefer order directly.

A direct ordering page costs you nothing per order (or a small flat fee, depending on the platform) versus 15-30% to a delivery app. For a ghost kitchen doing meaningful volume, shifting even 20% of orders to direct channels makes a significant difference.

The QR code use case for ghost kitchens

Ghost kitchens sometimes have more customer touchpoints than their name implies:

  • A pickup window where customers collect orders
  • A retail presence at a market or pop-up (similar to a food truck digital menu setup)
  • A partnership with a café or bar that serves your food

In any of these situations, a QR code linking to a menu is useful. Customers at a pickup window can scan to see what's available while they wait. Market visitors can browse before joining the queue. Café guests can see your full menu even if the café only carries a selection.

A basic digital menu linked to a QR code takes 15 minutes to set up and costs nothing to start.

Shorter is usually better. Without a dining room to fill tables and keep service moving, ghost kitchens succeed on execution and reorder rates. A focused menu of 15-25 items that you can make consistently well beats a sprawling menu of 50 items made at varying quality. Delivery customers remember bad experiences and don't reorder.

Photography is not optional. On a delivery app, your photo is your storefront. Customers can't smell the food, can't ask a server what's good, can't see the kitchen. A good photo does all of that work. Bad photos - or no photos - lose orders to competitors who invested in them.

Descriptions need to do real work. On a delivery app, a guest is choosing between your dish and a similar one from a competitor, without the benefit of a server's recommendation or the restaurant's atmosphere. Your description needs to give them a reason to choose yours: the key ingredients, what makes it worth ordering, the spice level if relevant.

Update for availability. If you run out of an item, mark it unavailable immediately. Nothing damages a ghost kitchen's rating faster than orders placed for items that then get cancelled. On your own digital menu, you can do this in seconds. On delivery platforms, do it before the platform cancels an order and issues a refund.

The simple setup for a new ghost kitchen

  1. Set up your delivery platform accounts with photos and descriptions for every item
  2. Create a simple digital menu on a free platform - here's how to create a QR menu in 15 minutes - this is your direct ordering page or a browseable menu for social media links like Instagram and Google
  3. Generate a QR code for the digital menu - use it at any physical touchpoints you have
  4. As you grow, consider a direct ordering tool to shift some volume off the commission-heavy platforms

You don't need a complex system to start. Get your delivery platforms working well first - that's where the orders come from initially. Add the direct channel as you build a customer base worth targeting.

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