A printed menu is a poster: the whole thing is in view at once, and the eye wanders. A phone is a window about eight lines tall that moves down one thumb-push at a time. The same words behave differently in the two, and a menu that was typeset for paper usually needs three changes before it reads well on glass.

The dish name has to work alone

On paper the name sits under a section header, beside a price, next to five other dishes — all of that context arrives at once. On a phone the name often arrives on its own, halfway through a scroll.

• Put the thing being sold first: "Lamb shoulder, slow roasted" rather than "Slow roasted shoulder of lamb".
• Cut the house adjectives. Every kitchen is hand-picked and locally sourced; none of it helps someone choose.
• Keep it to about four words, so it does not wrap on a small phone.

One line of description, where it earns its place

Descriptions are for dishes people cannot picture, or dishes where the price needs explaining. A burger does not need one. A dish with a name from another language does. Something at twice the price of everything around it does.

Where you write one, write what is in it, not how it makes you feel. Guests are scanning for whether something suits them, and "cured for six days" answers that question in a way "our signature dish" never does.

Let the tags carry the allergens

Vegetarian, vegan, gluten, nuts, spice — these are the reasons people scroll back up and ask a server. Tags put them on the row itself, they filter, and they stop the description sentence from turning into a legal notice.

If a guest has to ask a person whether something has nuts in it, the menu has failed at the one job where failing matters.

Photograph what people hesitate over

Photos on every row make a menu slower to load and harder to skim; photos on nothing make an unfamiliar dish a gamble. The dishes worth shooting are the ones staff get asked about, the ones that are bigger than they sound, and the ones you want to sell.

Categories are the navigation

On paper, section headers are decoration. On a phone they are the bar across the top that gets someone to the drinks in one tap. Eight categories with clear names beat four categories called things like "From the land".

And keep the order honest to how people eat: what they order first goes first. The section a guest is looking for at 7pm should not be the one they have to scroll past dessert to find.