Asked before,
answered honestly.

Most single venues are fully set up in one afternoon: import your existing menus, check the dishes, connect your website embed and print your first PDF. Groups take longer mostly because of conversations, not software — Estate plans include concierge onboarding where we do the import with you.

Yes. The importer reads Google Sheets, Excel, CSV and pasted text from Word documents. It recognises sections, dish names, descriptions and prices automatically and shows you a preview to approve before anything is created. Most venues bring in their full menu history in under an hour.

If you can use a menu, you can use Carte. The only step that touches code is pasting the website embed snippet — one copy-paste, and we'll happily do it with you on a screen share if you'd rather.

Your menus stay safe and readable, but publishing pauses until you pick a plan. We never delete your work, we never auto-charge a card we don't have, and you can export everything at any time.

Yes — WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow or fully custom builds. One snippet embeds a live menu that inherits your fonts and colours, loads in under half a second, and updates the moment you publish.

Very. Unlike PDFs, Carte menus are real, structured text that search engines read — every dish, description and price. Venues regularly tell us they start ranking for dish-level searches within weeks of switching from PDF menus.

Every menu gets a QR code you can print on table cards, posters or receipts — per menu, per section, or per venue. Guests scan and get a fast, beautiful mobile menu with allergen filters. No app, no PDF pinch-zooming.

On Brasserie and Estate, yes. Set the lunch menu to publish at 11:30 and dinner at 5pm, schedule a Sunday menu, or give a special a start and end time. Carte publishes and unpublishes on the clock so nobody has to remember.

No — that's the point. The Print Studio typesets your menu automatically in your house style: your fonts, spacing, dotted leaders, proper pagination and widow control. You press one button and collect a print-ready PDF.

A4, A5, DL and tasting-card formats out of the box, with crop marks and bleed for professional print runs. House styles are configurable per venue, and Brasserie and Estate plans support multiple styles for different menus.

Usually, yes. House styles cover typography, spacing, rules and ornaments — enough to match most printed menus closely. Bring your current menu to a demo and we'll recreate it live; that's our favourite party trick.

You tag each dish once with any of the 14 major allergens plus dietary tags (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and custom). Every published format — website, QR, print matrix — reads from those tags, so they never disagree.

Yes. QR and web menus include guest-side filters, so a coeliac diner can view only what they can eat — before they book, without asking, without anyone reading row 23 of a laminated grid.

The allergen matrix prints on demand from live data, so what you hand the inspector describes today's menu, not last month's. There's also a change log showing who edited what and when, which inspectors tend to like a great deal.

Always — every menu, dish, wine and price to CSV or JSON, on any plan, including expired trials. Your menus are yours. We earn renewals with the product, not with lock-in.

In UK/EU data centres, encrypted in transit and at rest, with daily backups kept for 30 days. We're GDPR compliant and our full security practices are documented in plain English — ask and we'll send them.

Any time, from your account, without phoning anyone. Upgrades apply immediately and are pro-rated; downgrades and cancellations apply at the next billing date. Annual plans get two months free.

Support is staffed for hospitality hours, not office hours — evenings and weekends included, because that's when menus matter. Brasserie gets priority response; Estate gets a dedicated contact who knows your setup.