Hotel or restaurant menu app with QR table ordering (no code)

A warung in Yogyakarta, a beach club in Canggu, a 40-room hotel in Surabaya with room service: all of them run on a menu that changes more often than the printed version admits. Prices creep up, the fish of the day sells out by 8 pm, the laminated card still lists the dessert you dropped in March. Guests wave for a waiter, the waiter walks to the till, the kitchen gets a handwritten ticket it cannot read. A menu app with QR table ordering fixes every one of those hand-offs: the guest scans a code on the table, sees the live menu with photos, orders, and watches the status change from received to cooking to served while the kitchen sees the same ticket on a tablet.

The usual options are a generic “digital menu” subscription that is really a PDF viewer, or a developer quote of Rp 40–60 million for something you will still have to explain in detail. Describing the app to App Builder Agent gets you the detail without the quote: your categories, your table numbers, your kitchen flow, a hosted backend so every device sees the same orders, and an APK for the staff phones. This guide walks through what the app needs, the exact prompt to start from, and the mistakes that show up on the first busy Saturday.

What a restaurant menu app must handle

• Categories with photos — Starters, mains, drinks, desserts, each item with a photo placeholder you replace from the image picker, a price and a short description.
• Availability toggles — A “sold out” switch per item that hides it from guests instantly, because the fish of the day will sell out.
• Table QR ordering — One QR code per table that opens the menu with the table number already filled in, so nobody types “Table 7” wrong.
• Cart with notes and modifiers — Spice level, no ice, extra sambal. Half the kitchen mistakes come from notes that had nowhere to go.
• Order status — Received, cooking, ready, served. The guest sees it, the waiter sees it, the kitchen changes it.
• Kitchen screen — A landscape tablet view with tickets sorted by time, colour-coded by age, one tap to move a ticket forward.
• Owner menu editor — Edit prices, add items, reorder categories without asking anyone to rebuild the app.
• Daily summary — Items sold, revenue per category, busiest hour. This is the report the printed menu never gave you.

Build it with App Builder Agent, step by step

Orders must be shared between guests, waiters and the kitchen, so this is a hosted-backend app from the first message. The agent deploys a live API for the project and wires every screen to it.

1. Create a mobile app project. Staff and kitchen use the app on Android phones and a tablet; guests use the web version from the QR code. Both come from the same project.
2. Describe the menu, the tables and the flow. Give real item names and prices. The agent uses them as seed data, which makes the preview useful immediately.
   Build a restaurant menu and ordering app for “Warung Sari” in Yogyakarta, prices in Rupiah. Categories: Nasi & Mie (Nasi Goreng 28,000; Mie Ayam 25,000), Sate (Sate Ayam 10 pcs 30,000), Minuman (Es Teh 6,000; Kopi Susu 15,000), Dessert (Es Campur 18,000). Each item has a photo placeholder, description, spice-level option and a sold-out toggle. 12 tables, each with its own QR code that opens the menu with the table number set. Guests add to a cart with notes, place the order, and see status: received, cooking, ready, served. Kitchen screen in landscape shows tickets newest at the bottom with a tap to advance status. Owner login edits menu and sees a daily sales summary. Hosted backend. Warm terracotta and cream design.
3. Order from two tables in the preview. Open the guest flow, place an order from Table 3 and Table 9, then switch to the kitchen screen and confirm both tickets appear with the right table numbers and notes. Advance one to “ready” and check the guest view updates.
4. Add the QR codes and the payment note. The agent can generate the 12 QR images from an owner screen so you print them once.
   Add a “Print table QR codes” screen for the owner that generates a QR image per table linking to the web menu with the table number, printable via the share sheet. Add a “Pay at counter” and “Scan our QRIS” option at checkout that shows our QRIS image; staff mark the order paid from the waiter screen.
5. Install and publish. Download the APK for the waiter phones and the kitchen tablet, publish the web version for the QR codes, and run one lunch service with both before you retire the paper menu.

Prompts that work well

The same structure works for hotels, cafés and food courts. Swap the nouns.

Common mistakes (and the fix)

• Guests typing the table number. They get it wrong, and food goes to the wrong table. Encode the table in each QR link so the number is set before the menu even loads.
• Kitchen tickets without the time. A ticket that does not show how long it has waited lets an order slip 25 minutes. Ask for the age of each ticket in minutes and a colour change at 10 and 20.
• Sold-out items still visible. If availability lives only in the app build, the toggle does nothing. Keep it on the hosted backend and tell the agent guest menus must refresh on open and every 60 seconds.
• Modifiers hidden in a free-text box. Spice level as a choice (mild, medium, hot) is read correctly; “not too spicy pls” is not. Use structured options for the frequent ones, free text for the rest.
• No offline plan for the kitchen tablet. The Wi-Fi drops mid-service. Ask the agent to queue status changes locally and sync when the connection returns, and to show a clear “offline” banner rather than failing silently.
• Duplicate orders from a double tap. Disable the place-order button while the request is in flight and show the order number on success.

Make it feel finished

• Replace every photo placeholder with a real photo taken on your phone in daylight; a menu with six real photos sells more than one with sixty stock images.
• Add a “Call waiter” button on the guest screen that shows the table number on the waiter’s phone with a sound.
• Show an estimated wait based on how many tickets are open in the kitchen (“about 15 minutes”).
• Put the daily summary behind the owner login and make it exportable via the share sheet as a CSV for your accountant.
• Give the kitchen screen big fonts and high contrast. It is read from a metre away with wet hands.

Installing, publishing and next steps

From the Preview tab, use “Download APK” to install the staff app on waiter phones and the kitchen tablet; the AI app builder produces a release-signed test APK with no Android Studio involved, and a signed store build with your own package id when you are ready for the Play Store. Publish the web version in one click for the QR codes: guests scan, the menu opens in their browser, and the order arrives on the same hosted backend the staff app uses. Test one service with the paper menu still on the tables, then take it away.

If you want to see the shape of a finished result before you type anything, browse the ready-made food and delivery apps. When ordering from the table works, the natural next steps are delivery to the neighbourhood, covered in the food delivery app guide, and tracking your kitchen stock so sold-out toggles become automatic, covered in the inventory and sales guide. Open the builder, paste your menu, and order from Table 1.

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