Daily menu: how to publish today's (and take down yesterday's)

It’s 12:40 PM. Someone in an office three blocks from your place is hungry, and types “comida corrida near me” into their phone. Your page comes up. They open it. They see a list: milanesa, tinga, chiles rellenos.

And there they are, stuck on just one thought: Is this from today?

The daily menu is the list of dishes, soup, and price that changes every day — and on most fondas’ pages, that list doesn’t say which day it’s from. There’s no way to tell. The date is nowhere to be found. So they close your page and go to the place across the street, which posts a photo of its chalkboard to Facebook every morning at ten. You had your daily menu published. It just never occurred to your page to say when.

Why does my daily menu need today’s date?

Because without a date, a list of dishes isn’t information: it’s an old photo that could be from any Tuesday in the last eight months. With a date, even an outdated menu is honest — people see it’s from yesterday and message you to ask; without one, they don’t ask anything, they just leave.

Chayo runs a lunch counter in the office district of Irapuato. She serves comida corrida Monday through Friday, and the dishes change every day. Her daily menu had been live since the page launched, and she still kept getting the same messages: “What’s on today?” The problem wasn’t the list — it was that it had no date.

Putting “Today, Tuesday, August 12” right at the top, in big letters, is the cheapest fix in this whole post — and the one that pays off the most.

What changed Chayo’s day most wasn’t even the messages. She used to write out the menu three times every morning: on the chalkboard, on Facebook, and then by hand again every time someone asked. Now she writes it once, on her page, and sends the link.

Should I separate the fixed menu from the daily menu?

Yes — they’re two different things, and they need to live in two different places, because if they’re mixed together, updating today’s menu means touching the whole page, and you’re not going to do that every day.

• The fixed menu — tortas, quesadillas, aguas frescas, the prices that have stayed the same for months. This barely moves.
• Today’s menu — the soup, the two or three dishes, the dessert, the price of the comida corrida. Three or four lines that expire at six in the evening.

When they’re separate, updating means touching three lines. That difference is literally what decides whether today’s menu is still alive in December.

(Changing a price on the fixed menu or marking something as sold out is a different move, and we’ve covered that one elsewhere.)

Can I publish a menu that changes every day?

Yes — and it’s the exception to a rule we repeat a lot around here: don’t publish any piece of information you can’t update the same day it changes. It’s the same reason we tell a shoe store not to publish available sizes.

The daily menu looks like the most obvious violation of that rule — it changes every day. And it’s actually the exact opposite, for two concrete reasons:

1. It changes once, not forty times. A shoe store’s sizes change with every sale, at hours nobody can predict. You decide your dishes once, early in the day, and they don’t move after that.
2. It’s a moment that already exists in your day. There’s already a point when you know what you’re serving: when you write it on the chalkboard. You don’t have to invent a habit — you just have to stick to one you already have.

A piece of information that updates once a day, at an hour you already know, isn’t a burden. Forty pieces of information that change on their own throughout the day — now that is.

How often should I update the daily menu?

Once a day, tied to something physical you already do — not “in the morning” in general, but at the exact moment you already decide on the menu.

“I’ll update it in the morning” isn’t a plan. “I update it when I write the chalkboard, before opening, from my phone” is.

Chayo does it while the comal heats up: she opens her page on her phone, changes three lines, done. It takes her less time than answering the first “What’s on today?” of the day — and that message barely comes in anymore.

If it depends on you remembering to do it “later,” it dies by the third week. Everyone who keeps it alive has it tied to something physical they were already doing.

What do I put on the page if I’m closed today, or there’s no comida corrida?

Your page needs to be able to say three things, not one: that there is a daily menu today, that there isn’t one today (just the fixed menu), or that you’re closed today.

Worse than an outdated menu is a page that doesn’t say there isn’t one today. Chayo is closed on Sundays. For months, her page looked exactly the same on Sunday as it did on Thursday, and people would show up in person only to find the shutters down. That’s not an outdated menu — that’s an angry customer.

The three things it needs to be able to say:

• Here’s today’s menu.
• No comida corrida today, just the fixed menu.
• We’re closed today (back Monday).

It’s one line, but it’s the one that saves someone from making the trip for nothing.

Describe it like this

If your page doesn’t exist yet, or doesn’t have a place for today’s menu, here’s exactly what you tell Proyecta:

I run a lunch counter in the office district of Irapuato. I want a page with two parts: at the top, the daily menu, with today’s date clearly visible, the soup, three dishes, dessert, and the price of the comida corrida ($95). Below that, the fixed menu: tortas, quesadillas, and aguas frescas with their prices. I want to be able to change today’s menu from my phone in two minutes, without touching anything else. I want the hours to show (Monday to Friday, 1 to 6, closed Sundays), the address with a map, and a WhatsApp button to 462 123 4567 for takeout orders.

It comes out published, with its own link. That’s the one you paste into your Facebook and your WhatsApp status.

What this doesn’t fix

Publishing today’s menu properly doesn’t make people who don’t know you exist find you. That’s a different job — your Google listing — and it’s a separate matter.

It serves two kinds of people, but they’re the ones that matter: the person who already has you in mind and wants to know if it’s worth the walk today, and the one standing a block away comparing you to two other places. Those are the people you answer before they even ask.

And no, it doesn’t replace the chalkboard by the door. It mirrors it, for the people who haven’t arrived yet.

Open it right now and look for today’s date

Just one thing, right from where you’re sitting: open your page on your phone and look for today’s date.

Don’t look for it as the owner, who already knows what’s cooking. Look for it like the person from the 12:40 office, who’s hungry and has twenty minutes. If you can’t find it right away, that’s your to-do for tomorrow — the kind of fix you make once and that keeps paying off every day.

And if your page simply has nowhere to put today’s menu, describe it the way we did above and publish it at proyecta.dev.