Nearly every guest who scans a QR code at the table is looking at your menu on a phone screen that's five or six inches wide, often in one hand while holding a drink or a child with the other. Yet a lot of digital menus are still built the way a print menu or a desktop webpage would be: dense columns of text, small fonts, and a layout that assumes the reader is sitting still with plenty of room to scan the whole page at once. On a phone, that same layout turns into endless pinching, zooming, and scrolling — exactly the friction you don't want between a hungry guest and an order.
The most common mobile problems are easy to spot once you look for them: body text under 14-16px that forces guests to zoom in, low contrast between text and background (pale grey on white looks elegant on a designer's laptop and unreadable in bright daylight), categories that aren't clearly separated so starters blur into mains, and photos that are either too small to show any detail or so large and uncompressed that the page takes several seconds to load on restaurant wifi. Any one of these is a small annoyance; together they push a guest to give up and just ask the server what's good.
The fixes are mostly about restraint rather than clever design tricks. Keep body text at 16px or larger and use real contrast — dark text on a light background, or vice versa, rather than two shades of the same pale color. Break the menu into short, clearly labeled sections guests can jump to instead of one long scroll, and put your best-selling or highest-margin dishes near the top of each section, since that's where mobile eyes actually land first. Buttons and category tabs should be large enough to tap accurately with a thumb — a good rule of thumb is at least 44 pixels tall, the same guideline app designers use for any touch target.
Photos deserve their own thought on mobile specifically, because the trade-off between quality and loading speed is more visible there than anywhere else. A photo that looks crisp on a laptop can take too long to load over a shaky 4G connection on a terrace, and a guest who's already scrolling won't wait around for it. The practical answer is professionally shot photos that are then compressed and sized specifically for mobile display — sharp enough to make a dish look appetizing at phone resolution, light enough to load almost instantly. Vertical or square crops also tend to work better than wide landscape shots, since they fill more of a phone screen without the guest having to scroll sideways or squint at a tiny strip of image.
There's also a very local wrinkle worth planning for: Strasbourg's outdoor terrace season means guests are often reading these menus in direct sunlight, where low-contrast designs and dark photos become almost impossible to see on a glossy phone screen. Pairing your digital menu with a simple, well-lit paper backup for terrace tables isn't a step backward — it's just acknowledging that glare is a real constraint your design needs to survive, not just a screen resolution. Testing your own menu outside on a sunny afternoon, phone in hand, is the fastest way to catch problems no amount of looking at it on a desk monitor will reveal.