Speed is a feature
Service doesn't wait. Every screen in Carte is built to be used one-handed, mid-shift, on a phone in a walk-in fridge.
About Carte
Built between
services.
Carte didn't start as a startup idea. It started as a fix for a real kitchen drowning in spreadsheet menus — and grew into the platform we wished had existed all along.
The origin
It began with a hotel,
a spreadsheet, and a typo.
In 2024 we were the web team for a small country-house hotel. Their menus lived in Google Sheets: one tab for food, one for wine, a fragile script pulling it onto the website, and a designer on retainer for the print versions. One Friday a decimal point went missing and a £58 Meursault sold for £5.80 all evening. Everyone laughed about it eventually. The sommelier took longer.
We built them a proper system: one place to edit, everything else generated. Within a month, three other venues had asked for it. Carte is that system, grown up — built between services, tested on real passes, and shaped by every chef who told us exactly what was wrong with it.
The belief
Menus are publishing,
and publishing should be one click.
A menu is the most-read, most-changed document a venue produces. Yet most venues still manage it like it's 1995: a Word file here, a PDF there, a website that someone's nephew updates. We believe the menu should be written once, by the people who cook it, and published everywhere by software that respects how it looks on paper.
That last part matters to us more than most. Carte's print output uses real typesetting rules — dotted leaders, widow control, proper pagination — because a beautiful menu isn't decoration. It's the first course.
How we work
Four things we refuse to compromise on.
Your menus are yours
Full export on every plan, forever — including lapsed trials. We earn renewals with the product, not with lock-in.
Print is not an afterthought
Most software treats paper as legacy. We treat it as the standard our typesetting has to live up to.
Built with kitchens, not for them
Every feature ships after real venues break it first. If a head chef can't use it during prep, it isn't finished.
The people
A small team with
flour on its CV.
Dominik Kapelewski
Two decades building for the web; several hundred evenings rebuilding hotel menus by hand before deciding software should do it.
Hannah Reece
Previously fintech infrastructure. Joined after watching her parents' pub fight a laminated allergen folder every weekend.
Jules Baptiste
Ex-editorial designer. Owns more specimen books than cookbooks and believes a dotted leader is a small act of kindness.
Priya Sharma
Twelve years front-of-house and events management. Translates 'chef-speak' into product decisions, fluently, in both directions.