Dietary and allergen labels

Marking dishes vegan, gluten-free or containing nuts.

Two different kinds of label

On each dish you'll find two groups of checkboxes, and they mean opposite things to a diner. Using them is entirely optional — a menu with none of them ticked works perfectly well, and because a diner may genuinely rely on what you tick, leaving a label off is always safer than guessing at it. There's more on that below.

Dietary — vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, low sodium. These say this dish is suitable for you.
Contains — peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, fish, dairy, eggs, soy, sesame. These say this dish contains something.

Whatever you tick shows as a short italic line under the dish — Vegan, Gluten-Free · Contains peanuts, tree nuts — on the card and again when a diner opens it.

Diners can filter on both: ticking a dietary label narrows the menu to those dishes, while ticking an allergen hides the dishes containing it.

Why it's a plain line and not colored badges. It was badges — green for dietary, yellow for contains, each with a little icon. On a short menu they looked smart. On a forty-dish menu they were a wall of green: so many that they stopped meaning anything, and the menu underneath became hard to read. Most diners aren't looking for them, and the whole page was paying for it.

Nothing was lost but the decoration. The same words are in the same place, and the filter works exactly as before.

Halal and kosher aren't here

They were, and they were removed — because neither is really a property of a dish. A dish isn't kosher because of its ingredients; it's kosher because of the kitchen it was cooked in and the certification standing behind that kitchen. The same is largely true of halal. Ticking a box on one plate was offering you a claim that plate can't carry on its own, and offering a diner one they might lean on hard.

If your restaurant is halal or kosher, say so about the restaurant: in your banner heading or tagline, or on your About page, where you can also name who certifies you. That's a stronger statement than a label on each dish, and a truer one.

Filter options only appear for labels you've actually used. If nothing on your menu is marked vegan, there's no "Vegan" option in the search box. Tag one dish and it appears; untag it and it goes away. That's deliberate — a filter full of options that match nothing is worse than no filter.

Substitutions available

There's a third checkbox that isn't dietary at all — it just flags that you're happy to adapt the dish. It joins the end of the same line and stays out of the filter, because "we'll adjust this" isn't something a diner can meaningfully filter on.

The allergy notice

Every menu we host carries a short allergy notice beneath it, telling diners that dietary and allergen information comes from the restaurant and to check with staff before ordering. Under Administration → Site Content you can write your own wording for it; leave the box blank and it uses our standard wording about telling staff and shared kitchens.

The notice itself can't be switched off. It's the only allergy warning your diners ever see — they don't read our terms or yours — so it stays. Our Terms of Service cover this in section 3.

This is deliberately a site-wide setting, not a per-dish one. Cross-contamination is a property of your kitchen rather than of any individual plate, and you shouldn't have to tick "shared kitchen" on sixty dishes. It also renders outside the search filter, so a diner searching for "soup" can't accidentally hide an allergy warning.

A word on accuracy

These labels are only as accurate as what's ticked. Marking something gluten-free is a statement a diner may rely on, so it's worth being careful, especially with "free from" claims in a kitchen where the ingredient is present elsewhere.

None of this is required, so when in doubt, leave it off. An unticked label simply means you haven't said either way, and a diner who needs to know will ask. A wrong one is a promise you didn't mean to make. Labeling the handful of dishes you're certain about is worth far more than labeling all of them approximately.