An English menu for your restaurant: one menu, two languages

If you run a restaurant in Bacalar, Sayulita, Tulum, or the center of any city that gets visitors from out of town, you’ve already lived this scene: a table of four sits down, opens the menu, goes quiet for a minute, and ends up ordering guacamole and beers. It’s not that they weren’t hungry — they didn’t understand a word and ordered the only thing they recognized. An English menu for your restaurant isn’t a luxury reserved for big places: it’s the difference between a 400-peso check and a 1,200-peso one. All it really means is your same menu, in Spanish and English, in the same place, so a customer who doesn’t read Spanish understands what they’re ordering.

And no, you don’t need to print two menus.

The table that only ordered guacamole

Rosy runs a café in Bacalar. She serves breakfast: chilaquiles, enfrijoladas, huevos motuleños, house-made bread. In high season, six out of every ten tables speak English.

Her menu was in Spanish only. Here’s what happened every single day: the table would open the menu, point at a line, ask “what is this?”, and the waiter — juggling four tables at once — would answer as best they could: “is like… eggs with sauce”. The tourist would order scrambled eggs.

Chilaquiles are the dish Rosy is proudest of. It took her years to get the salsa just right. And they almost never made it to tourist tables — not because people didn’t like them, but because no one ever knew what they were.

How do you get an English menu without printing two cards or relying on the waiter?

The real fix is one single digital menu that lives at one link, with both versions — Spanish and English — built in: a QR code on the table, a button that says English, and the same price on both sides, because it’s the same piece of data.

You’ve probably already tried the other two options, and they both fail for different reasons.

Having the waiter translate on the fly. That works at ten in the morning on a Tuesday. At one in the afternoon on a Saturday, it doesn’t. Plus every waiter explains things differently, and whoever speaks the best English becomes the bottleneck for the whole restaurant.

Printing a separate English menu. The problem isn’t the printing — it’s that the English version always goes stale. You raise the price of coffee and fix the Spanish menu, because that’s the one you look at every day. The English one is left with last year’s price, and the customer holding it is exactly the one who won’t complain: they pay confused, or leave without tipping.

Should you translate the dish names into English?

No. The names stay in Spanish — chilaquiles are called chilaquiles, not “fried tortilla chips in sauce.” Translating the name strips the dish of what makes it special, and on top of that, no one will recognize it or order it. This is where almost everyone gets it wrong.

What does work is keeping the name and adding a short line underneath explaining what it is and how it’s served:

Chilaquiles verdes — Crispy tortillas simmered in tomatillo salsa, topped with cream, queso fresco and onion. Add chicken or a fried egg.

Enfrijoladas — Soft tortillas folded in a warm black bean sauce, with cheese and cream. Mild, no chile.

Cochinita pibil — Slow-roasted pork marinated in achiote and sour orange, wrapped in banana leaf. Not spicy; the habanero salsa comes on the side.

Notice the pattern: the name in Spanish, one sentence about what it is, and the detail people actually want to know. You’re not translating the menu — you’re explaining it.

And don’t run the whole menu through an automatic translator without reading it first: it translates “tortilla” as omelette (that’s how it’s used in Spain) and leaves you with sentences a foreigner has to read twice without understanding. Translating the names is exactly what you shouldn’t do, and it’s the first thing the machine does.

What information should an English menu for tourists include?

The four things a tourist looks for on the menu are whether it’s spicy, whether it has meat, how big it is, and what else comes with it — and every one you add is one less question for a busy waiter.

• Is it spicy? Mark it with a chile icon or the word spicy. This is, literally, question number one. A dish marked mild sells better than one left unmarked, because someone who can’t handle chile no longer has to take the risk.
• Does it have meat? Put vegetarian next to the dish. And be honest about it: if the beans are cooked in lard, don’t mark it as vegetarian.
• How big is it? “Order of 4 pieces,” “to share,” “comes with rice and beans.” The tourist has no way of knowing whether one plate is coming or three.
• Does it come with anything else? If breakfast includes coffee and fruit, say so. An unexplained 180-peso plate looks pricier than a 180-peso plate that comes with coffee included.

What currency should menu prices be in for tourists?

In pesos, with the letters MXN next to the price — don’t add a dollar column, because the exchange rate moves and you’ll always end up on the wrong side of it with someone.

Add the letters to every price: $180 MXN, not just “$180.” The peso sign and the dollar sign are the same symbol, and a tourist who sees “$180” on the menu posted outside might read it as one hundred eighty dollars and keep walking without sitting down. Three letters are all it takes to avoid losing that table before it ever comes in.

One QR code and a button that says English

The QR code and the language switch need to be simple: one single code on the table and a button that says English at the top of the menu — that’s it. Four details make the difference:

• One QR code, not two. No two placemats, no two stickers. One single code that leads to the menu, with the language switch living inside the page itself.
• The button at the top, in English. It should say English, not “Inglés.” Whoever needs it isn’t reading Spanish.
• Better a button than a guess. You can auto-detect the phone’s language, but it gets it wrong often enough: plenty of locals have their phone set to English, and plenty of tourists have theirs set to Spanish because they’re practicing.
• One single place where you change prices. The price, the “sold out” tag, and the photos are the same in both languages. The only thing that exists twice is the description, and you write that once and you’re done.

How do I build an English menu for my restaurant this week?

In Proyecta, you describe it in your own words and out comes the published page, with its own link. Something like this:

“I want a digital menu for my café in Bacalar, it’s called Café Sirena. Breakfast: chilaquiles verdes and rojos 145, enfrijoladas 130, huevos motuleños 155, molletes 110, café de olla 45, cappuccino 55. The menu needs to be in Spanish and English, with a button to switch languages. Mark which ones are spicy and which are vegetarian. Prices in pesos. Below that, hours from 8 to 2 and a WhatsApp button.”

The page comes out, you open it on your phone, you look it over as if you were the customer, and you ask for whatever changes are missing: “note that the chicken comes on the side with the chilaquiles,” “mark the rojos as spicy.” Once it’s right, you print the QR code and stick it on the tables.

There’s one thing no one can do for you: checking the English before you publish it. You don’t need a professional translator, but you do need someone who actually speaks it to read it through once. If you have a foreign customer you trust, ask them — they’re usually happy to help.

Where do I start translating the menu?

With the five best-selling dishes, not the whole menu. Don’t try to translate everything on day one: pick your five best sellers, write their English line, mark which ones are spicy, and publish that. Add the rest the following week.

If you want to see it in action, describe your restaurant at proyecta.dev and see how your menu looks in both languages. You’ll be able to open it on your phone before the coffee’s even done brewing.