Restaurant websites in Brussels: menus, bookings and local visibility

The site should make the concept, current menu, establishment-set prices, address, hours, contact details and booking options unambiguous. Important information should not depend on an ephemeral social post.

In Brussels, support the languages that the audience genuinely needs and assign an owner to each version. An outdated translation can be more confusing than a smaller but dependable language set.

On a small screen, make the phone number, directions, menu and booking route easy to reach. Use readable type, adequate touch targets and a logical order for keyboard and screen-reader users.

Optimise photographs without removing useful detail and reserve their space in the layout. Test on a slower connection and several devices rather than drawing conclusions from one laboratory score.

An internal form, third-party service or phone call creates different operational needs. Check availability management, confirmations, cancellations, personal data, accessibility and supplier charges.

Explain what happens after the action: whether the booking is confirmed or pending, how the restaurant handles changes and how the customer can follow up. Do not describe a request as confirmed when human approval is still required.

A structured HTML page is easier to read, translate and update than a menu image. A PDF may remain useful for printing, but it should not be the only way to view dishes.

Publish information whose accuracy the restaurant can maintain, including allergens in line with its obligations and procedures. Give content owners a simple way to update dishes, prices, unavailable items and exceptional hours.

The Google Business Profile and website should show consistent name, address, hours and contact details. Select the category that accurately represents the establishment and maintain exceptional closures.

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence. A complete profile helps Google and users understand the restaurant, but neither a website nor one optimisation can guarantee local placement.

Someone landing on a restaurant’s site wants to know, in this order: is it open now, where is it, what kind of food, at what price, and how to book. If any of those answers requires scrolling three screens or opening a menu, part of the visitors leave for the Google listing or the competitor next door.

The area visible without scrolling should therefore hold the name, one sentence stating the cuisine and atmosphere, today’s hours, the neighbourhood or address, and two actions: book and see the menu. The phone number is tappable on mobile. Everything else — the story of the place, the chef’s portrait, the gallery — comes after and deserves its place, but not the first one.

That hierarchy does not rule out a beautiful photograph. It only forbids the photograph being the only thing on screen. A full-screen image with a logo in the middle and nothing else forces every visitor to hunt; it is the most common layout and the least useful.

Opening hours are the most consulted piece of information and the most often wrong. They live in four places — the site, the Google listing, social media and the door — and diverge from the first week of annual closure. Decide on a single source, usually the Google listing because it is the most visible, and update the site from it, or the reverse, but never both independently.

Provide a spot on the site for exceptional closures, visible from the home page when active: summer holidays, closure for a private event, a Belgian public holiday, roadworks in the street. That banner must be editable by the restaurateur in under a minute, from a phone, or it will never be kept up to date.

Show hours as text, never as an image, and separate lunch and dinner service, kitchen and bar if the hours differ. A note such as “last orders at 9.30 pm” avoids wasted trips and negative reviews that have nothing to do with the food.

Structure the menu in sections — starters, mains, desserts, drinks, daily menu — with a heading per section and one line per dish: name, short description, price. That structure reads on a phone, translates into another language without redoing the layout, and lets a search engine understand that the page describes a menu.

The displayed price must be the price charged in the dining room, VAT and service included as Belgian price-display rules require. A daily menu that changes every day can be published as a short list updated in the morning, or point explicitly to a photo of the day’s board on social media, provided the page says so.

For allergens, the European rule requires information on the fourteen major allergens to be available for non-prepacked food, in writing or orally depending on the restaurant’s procedure. On the site, state that procedure clearly — pictograms on the menu, a sheet available on request, ask the staff — without promising a completeness the kitchen cannot guarantee every day.

The phone remains the simplest channel for a small establishment, but it only works during service and leaves the customer without written confirmation. A request form on the site, which emails the restaurant and sends an acknowledgement to the customer, adds the written trail without committing the restaurant until it confirms. You then need to answer quickly and say so on the page: “reply within two hours during opening hours”.

• A third-party booking tool manages availability in real time, sends confirmations and reminders, and reduces no-shows.
• In return it charges a subscription or a fee per cover, imposes its interface and collects personal data under its own terms.
• Read those terms, check that the tool works from the keyboard and list it as a processor in the privacy policy.

Whatever the channel, say what happens next: booking confirmed immediately or request pending, policy for groups, tolerance for lateness, and how to cancel. Those four pieces of information prevent most calls and misunderstandings.

A restaurant’s photographs sell an experience: the room with customers in it, a dish as it arrives at the table, the team during service, the terrace in good weather. They must be recent and reflect what the customer will find; a photo of a dish removed from the menu a year ago or of a room since refurbished creates disappointment on arrival.

Avoid stock photographs of tomatoes and wine glasses: they are recognisable, say nothing about the place and weaken trust. Two hours with a photographer during a quiet service yield about thirty usable images for a year, across the site, the Google listing and social media.

Technically, every image must be resized and compressed for the web, with its dimensions declared in the code so the page does not jump while loading. An eight-megabyte photo straight from a camera slows the site for every mobile visitor; it is the most frequent cause of slowness on restaurant sites.

Track useful actions such as opening the menu, requesting directions, calling or starting a booking, with appropriate consent controls. Ensure an event is not mistakenly reported as a completed reservation.

Schedule recurring checks of the menu, opening hours, booking links and contact information. Editorial reliability is an operating responsibility, not a one-off launch task.