How your menu is built

Menus, categories, items, options and sizes — how the pieces fit together before you start editing.

Dinerly builds a menu out of a few separate pieces, and it is worth understanding how they fit together before you start editing. Five minutes spent here will save you from the kind of afternoon where you cannot work out why a price change did not appear where you expected it to.

The building blocks

• A menu is a whole list of food. Most restaurants only ever need one, but you might keep an “À la carte” and a separate “Sunday lunch” if the two are genuinely different lists.
• A category is a section within a menu, such as Starters, Pizzas, Desserts or Drinks. Categories are what give the customer’s page its structure.
• An item is a single dish, with its price.
• Modifiers are the choices a customer makes about a dish, such as extra cheese, no onions or chips instead of salad. They are collected into modifier groups so that you can build “Pizza toppings” once and attach it to every pizza, instead of typing the same twenty toppings out on each one.
• Variants are sizes or versions of the same dish, such as small, medium and large, or a 330ml and a 500ml bottle. Each one carries its own price.

The easiest way to picture the whole thing is as a set of nested boxes: a menu holds categories, a category holds items, and each item can have variants, which decide which size the customer is buying, and modifiers, which decide what is on it.

The Menu page

Open Menu from the left-hand menu and you will find these tabs across the top:

• Menu shows your menus and the categories inside them.
• Items shows every dish you have in a single list, which makes it the quickest place to look when you just want to check a price.
• Modifiers and Groups hold the individual options and the reusable sets of them.
• Variants holds your reusable size groups.

Changing several things at once

On the Items tab you can tick several dishes and then use Change category, Change price or Add modifiers on all of them together. This is how you put five per cent on every main course, or add a “Spice level” group to your whole curry section, without opening thirty items one after the other.

Reorder lets you drag items into the order customers will see them in, which is worth doing rather than leaving to chance. People order from the top of a list far more often than the bottom, so your best seller earns its place at the top of its category. You will need to clear any search or filters before you can drag, because Dinerly cannot reorder a list it is only showing you part of.

Where to go next

• Create and manage categories
• Add a menu item
• Add modifiers
• Set up variants
• Mark an item as out of stock

Reuse things rather than repeating them. Whenever you find yourself about to type the same set of options onto a second dish, stop and make it a modifier group instead. It takes the same amount of time today, and it means that when the price of extra cheese changes you edit it once rather than on thirty separate pizzas.

Last updated 20 September 2026