How many QR codes does a restaurant business need?

Usually three to a few dozen, depending on scale — see the setup above. Our free plan covers three dynamic codes with no scan limit, and Starter at $4/month covers 25, which is enough for most single-location operations.

Static or dynamic for this?

Dynamic for anything whose destination could change, which in practice is almost everything printed. Static only for things like Wi-Fi credentials that have no URL at all. Full comparison here.

What happens if I stop paying?

Your codes keep redirecting and keep counting scans. Codes over the free limit become frozen, which means you cannot edit them — not that they stop working. Nothing you have printed goes dead. The full promise.

QR codes for restaurants

The menu code

Use a dynamic code, without exception. Menus change seasonally, prices change more often than that, and a static code pointing at a PDF means reprinting every table tent when the PDF is replaced. Point the dynamic code at your menu page and edit the destination whenever it moves.

Point it at a web page rather than a PDF if you possibly can. A PDF on a phone opens in a viewer, loads slowly on a poor connection, and requires pinch-zooming at a table. This is the single most common complaint about restaurant QR menus and it is a formatting problem, not a QR problem.

The review code

Google review codes are the fastest-growing code type by a wide margin — one platform's telemetry shows 280% growth between 2024 and 2026 across 47 million scans (imqrscan.com, single-vendor data, directional only). The reason is obvious: a card at the counter at the moment someone is happy converts far better than an email the next day.

Get the destination right. Use your Google Business Profile's direct review link, not your listing — it should open the star-rating dialog, not a search result. Make it dynamic, because Google has changed the shape of these URLs before.

Printing for a restaurant environment

Light levels are the enemy. Dim dining rooms mean cameras run at high ISO with motion blur. Print larger than you think — 30mm minimum on a table tent, 40mm if the room is genuinely dark.
Avoid gloss lamination on anything under a downlight. Matte lamination protects just as well and does not throw a specular highlight across the code.
Keep the quiet zone. Designers routinely crop the margin to fit a code into a decorative frame. Four modules of blank space, minimum.
Do not print on a curve. Codes wrapped around condiment bottles or tented sharply across a fold fail far more often than flat ones.

What to label it

"Scan for menu" outperforms a bare code. A frame with a short instruction removes the hesitation of a guest who is not sure whether the code is a menu, a payment request or a survey — and in a restaurant, ambiguity about payment is actively off-putting.

A realistic setup

One dynamic code for the menu, on table tents and the window.
One dynamic code for Google reviews, on the bill presenter and the counter.
Optionally a third for job applications, on the door — cheap, and restaurants hire constantly.

That is three dynamic codes, which fits our free plan. If you run several locations and want per-location scan counts, you will want a code per location per purpose, which is where the $4 Starter plan becomes relevant.