Short links for restaurants — reservations, menu and delivery

Imagine this scene. You printed three hundred door hangers, a nice QR code, a delivery address, everything set. A month passes. You change your delivery service because the previous one was taking too high a commission. And suddenly those three hundred hangers lead nowhere. The stickers on the table too. The business card at the checkout. The flyers that someone took home and stuck on their fridge.

This is happening all the time. Gastronomy lives by change: suppliers are replaced, reservation systems go bankrupt or raise prices, menus rotate with the season. And paper, once printed, is deaf to these changes. It just hangs there, showing an old, dead address.

Links for restaurants are not a decoration from the marketing department. They are more like a silent installation, like plumbing. Either they work for you quietly every day, or they drip into your wallet every time something changes in the establishment.

Permanent address, variable content

I will try to frame this differently than how it is usually written about. Most restaurateurs think of a link as something assigned to a platform. I have reservations in such and such a system, so I paste its address. I have delivery in this service, so I paste that one. And here is the mistake that comes back to haunt you later.

Because then the address restaurant-booking-platform.com/widget?id=8842&utm=... lives exactly as long as your contract with this provider. If you terminate the cooperation, the link dies along with it.

Reverse this. Create several constant, short addresses based on what they do, rather than who stands behind them:

• cutty.dev/rezerwacja leads to where you are currently accepting tables
• cutty.dev/menu to the menu (PDF, subpage, doesn't matter)
• cutty.dev/dowoz to the current delivery service
• cutty.dev/opinia to the Google review

These four addresses, once embedded in the business card, website, and receipt, stay there forever. And what lies underneath belongs only to you. You change it in the panel, save it, and you're done. Ten seconds.

Target substitution, or the end of visits to the printing house

This is where it all pays off the most. The link's purpose can be replaced without touching the address itself. It sounds trivial until you calculate how many times a year you reprint materials.

Let's go back to those door hangers. Three hundred pieces, cutty.dev/dowoz, QR. After a month, you negotiated a better commission with someone else, let's say a drop from 30 to 22 percent (with a turnover of several dozen thousand per month, that is real money). You enter the panel, change the /dowoz target to a new URL, and save. And all three hundred hangers, those already hanging on doors throughout the city, from this second onwards direct to the new supplier. You don't order a single new sticker.

The same goes for the season. cutty.dev/menu is available on your tablet and at every table. In December, you redirect it to the Christmas menu, in summer to tapas and lemonades, and after the season, you revert to the permanent one. The guest always sees what is current. The cardboard on the table doesn't budge.

A QR code that will outlive your supplier

A QR code is essentially just packaging for an address. Since you can redirect an address, the QR code also operates under new rules. You generate it once for cutty.dev/rezerwacja, laminate it, place it on the bar, and stop worrying that in six months you'll replace your reservation widget and have to do everything all over again.

A few things from practice that are worth letting go of or, on the contrary:

One function, one code. Do not cram reservations, menus, and delivery into a single QR with a selection menu, because the guest at the table has no patience for branches.

Test the print with a phone from the distance at which the customer actually sits, not from ten centimeters. Code that scans perfectly right under your nose can freeze when the table is by the window and sunlight is falling on it.

And on the bar counter, provide a QR code along with the address written in plain text. Some people, especially older ones, prefer to type cutty.dev/menu with their finger rather than aiming the camera. Let them have a choice.

Where your guests are really coming from

Let's assume you want to know whether anyone is scanning these door handle tags, or if all the traffic is coming from a single Instagram post. A sensible question. And it can be answered without profiling people, without cookies trailing a person across half the internet.

It is enough to give each channel a separate address:

• cutty.dev/dowoz-ulotka on a paper flyer
• cutty.dev/dowoz-ig in the Instagram bio
• cutty.dev/dowoz-qr on a hanger

After a week you sit down, compare clicks and suddenly you know where to add more, and what to let go. (At one restaurant I know, it turned out that flyers dropped into mailboxes had a conversion close to zero, while all the delivery was driven by a single local post in a neighborhood group. They cut out the flyers, saving on printing.)

Statistics in cutty count clicks, not people. The guest's IP goes into a hash, data remains on servers in the EU, and you get what is actually needed: how many, when, and roughly from where. Without building a profile on the client and without selling to anyone who is ordering pad thai at two in the morning.

An ending that can be dictated over the phone

A small detail, but it makes a difference. A guy who sees twojarestauracja.cutty.dev/opinia on a receipt trusts it more than some xyz3k9. A branded suffix is easy to read at a glance, looks good on a flyer, and most importantly, can be dictated over the phone during a reservation without having to spell it out character by character.

If I had to draw a start for someone on a napkin, it would look like this:

• /rezerwacja on the website, in the Google Business Profile, in the bio
• /menu as a QR code on the table and on the menu board
• /dowoz on hangtags, flyers, and stickers for packages
• /opinia on the receipt and in the thank-you note for deliveries
• separate endings for the channels you want to compare

Four fixed addresses. Print once. The rest is just replacing targets and glancing at the numbers.

Because the truth is that in gastronomy you have a million things on your mind anyway: the schedule, deliveries, a review that dropped to three stars because someone's soup was lukewarm. The fewer of these things that require you physically—running to the printer, re-pasting addresses—the better. A good, permanent link is exactly like that: you set it up once and then forget about it. And it does its job. If you want, create such links for your restaurant at cutty.dev and test it on one channel, even on a menu. One less QR code to reprint is already something.