Ceylon Cooking Menu Maker
Your Guests Skip the Dish They Cannot Picture.
Kottu, pol sambol, ambul thiyal. If somebody has never eaten it, they order the thing they recognise instead, and your best dish sits there. Menu Maker builds a QR menu that explains each dish the way your floor staff explain it at the table.
No account, no card. Your menu saves in your own browser, and the sample is a real one.
- No app for your guests
- 117 dishes, wording included
- One menu stays free
QR menu
Dish photos and explainers at the table
The problem
The Menu Is Not the Hard Part. The Explaining Is.
A printed menu gives a guest a name and a price. For a dish they grew up with, that is enough. But for kiri hodi or a lamprais it is not, so they ask, and someone on your floor explains it again, twenty times a service, in the middle of the rush.
And the ones who do not ask just order chicken curry.
The other thing paper does is go stale. Your fish supplier moves a price and you either cross it out in pen or live with the old number until the next reprint.
What is different here
Import a Dish and the Description Comes with It.
Every other menu builder drops you in front of a blank text box and a blinking cursor. Ceylon Cooking skips that part, because we have already written the paragraph. Each of the 117 dishes in the library carries what it tastes like, how hot it is, whether it is vegan, and what it is normally eaten alongside.
Import kottu roti and the item lands saying savoury, smoky and a little chewy, with a slow chilli heat at the back of the throat. You set your price. That is the job done.
It is the same text that runs on our recipe pages, so a menu cannot claim a taste the recipe does not.
What lands in the editor
Sri Lankan Chicken Curry
your priceChicken thighs simmered in roasted curry powder, curry leaves, and coconut milk. A common home-style version, and regional and family variations exist.
Everything above the price came from the library. Every word of it is yours to edit.
What is in the library
The Library, in Numbers.
Anybody can claim a dish library. So here is the whole thing counted. Every dish comes with a description, a heat level and a line on what it is normally eaten with, and all of it was written for the recipe pages long before there was a menu builder to put it in.
One thing we refuse to do is guess. A dietary tag on a real menu is a health question, not a formatting decision, so only the vegan and vegetarian claims the recipe itself makes are carried across. Chicken says nothing about dairy, so nothing is inferred from it. Allergens stay your call and your kitchen's.
Every dish here is a page you can read before you import it, and the full recipe index is the same list a guest could find on their own.
- 117
- dishes ready to import
- Each with a menu-length description cut from the recipe.
- 89
- carry a Sinhala or Tamil name
- Shown to a guest as an also-called line.
- 90 and 74
- vegetarian and vegan, tagged
- Taken from the recipe, never inferred from a dish name.
- 46 / 51 / 20
- mild, medium and hot
- Every dish carries a level, and none of them are rounded down.
At the table
The Guest Taps the Dish and Reads It Themselves.
On the QR menu, an imported dish carries a short explainer a guest can open where they are sitting: its Sinhala name, what it actually tastes like, and what it is usually served with. Nobody has to catch a waiter to ask what a hopper is.
This is the part a generic menu tool cannot copy, because it needs a recipe library sitting behind it, and we have one.
Scan
The QR code opens the live menu in the phone browser.
Tap
A dish opens with the name, heat, diet tags and short explainer.
Choose
The guest orders without waiting for the same table-side explanation.
Planning the menu
The Sections a Sri Lankan Menu Usually Needs.
Menus arrive in a handful of shapes, and a Sri Lankan one has sections a European template never thinks to offer. Here is what the library holds for each, so you can see whether your section is covered before you type a letter. The counts are live, and every one of them opens a page you can read first.
Short eats
11 dishesKottu, rolls, cutlets and buns. Counter food people order standing up, and the part of the menu that sells at four in the afternoon.
Rice and the bases under it
15 dishesPlain rice, yellow rice, ghee rice and the curry bases the rest of the plate is built on.
Vegetable curries
25 dishesThe three or four sides that turn one curry into a rice and curry. It is also the section a vegetarian guest reads first, which is why it is the biggest one we have.
Chicken, meat and egg
4 dishesThe dish a nervous first-timer orders, so it is worth describing better than the rest.
Seafood
11 dishesFish, prawn and crab curries built on goraka, coconut and roasted spice.
Dhal and beans
4 dishesCheap to cook, on every plate at home, and the safe order for somebody who cannot take heat.
Sambols and pickles
13 dishesPol sambol, lunu miris, seeni sambol. Small money on the bill, and the first thing a regular asks for by name.
Hoppers and breakfast
17 dishesHoppers, string hoppers, kiribath and pittu. Called breakfast, ordered at nine at night.
Sweets and festive
10 dishesWatalappam, kalu dodol and the rest of the tray, for the end of a meal and for a festival week.
Drinks and Ceylon tea
6 dishesPlain tea, milk tea and the cold ones. Most menus give this section two words and a price.
If you run the place, there is a second thing here worth two minutes. Our directory of Sri Lankan restaurants and grocers is free to appear in. A menu that explains itself and a listing somebody can find are two halves of the same problem.
How it works
Three Steps, and the First One Is the Short One.
Import the Dish
Search the library, pick the dish, and the item arrives with its description, its dietary tags and its spice level already filled in. You set the price. For anything we have not written up, there is a blank box like everywhere else.
Publish It
The menu goes live at its own short web address. Change a price later and publish again, and the same address shows the new one within seconds.
Put the Code on the Table
Print the QR code for the table or the window, and print the paper menu from the same data if you want both. The sticker never has to change again.
Three ways to fill a menu
Type It, Ask AI, or Import It. Most Kitchens Mix All Three.
Type It Yourself
Sections, items, prices, dietary tags, in a plain editor with a live preview. This is what every menu builder gives you, and it is the floor, not the pitch.
Ask AI for the Wording
For a dish the library does not cover, generate a description from the name and edit it. Useful for the half of your menu that is not Sri Lankan.
Import from the Library
The description, the spice level, the dietary tags and the explainer, all already written for 117 dishes. This is the part nobody else can hand you.
Writing the menu
How to Word a Dish for a Guest Who Has Never Eaten It.
Descriptions are the part owners put off, and it is notwriter's block. It is that a dish you have cooked since childhood is genuinely hard to explain to somebody who has never seen it. Five things we learned writing these paragraphs for the library, whether you import them or write your own.
- 1
A Guest Cannot Taste an Adjective
Delicious, authentic and famous tell them nothing. Give them the texture and the flavour instead: savoury, smoky, a little chewy, with bits of roti soaking up curry gravy and a slow chilli heat at the back of the throat. That is kottu roti written so a stranger can decide.
kottu roti - 2
Keep the Name the Dish Already Has
Most of the library, 89 dishes of 117, carries a Sinhala or Tamil name, and the explainer shows it as an also-called line under the English one. Somebody who grew up on hoppers is looking for aappa, and somebody who has never had one now knows what to say out loud when they order.
plain hoppers, or aappa - 3
Say What Arrives Beside It
Ambul thiyal is sour, peppery and nearly black, and it wants a big mound of plain rice beside it. A guest who orders it on its own has a bad meal and blames the dish. The line about what it is eaten with is not decoration.
ambul thiyal, the sour fish curry - 4
Be Honest About the Heat
Every dish in the library carries a level, 46 mild, 51 medium and 20 hot, and none of them are rounded down to sell better. A guest who trusts your medium once will trust the rest of the menu.
- 5
Leave the Cook's Notes on the Recipe Page
Our taste notes often end with troubleshooting for whoever is standing at the pan, and the importer cuts those sentences before a guest ever sees them. Somebody holding a menu does not need to know what to do if the curry powder was not roasted dark enough.
Where this actually is
What Is Finished, and What Is Not.
Here is the honest line. The builder works today and needs no account, because your menu is saved in your own browser and never reaches us. What is not built is the hosted half: a live QR link that stays current for your guests, which is the part that needs an account.
Working Today
- The builder, with import from the dish library
- The live preview, print layout and download
- The dish explainer behind every imported item
Not Open Yet
- Publishing to a live QR link your guests can scan
- Owner logins, so a menu follows you between devices
- Photo uploads, translation and the paid tier
Pricing
One Menu Stays Free. The Rest Is Not Priced Yet.
Free
$0
One menu, and everything a guest sees.
- One menu
- QR web menu and a print version
- Prices, dietary tags and spice levels
- Import from the dish library
Pro
LaterNot priced yet
For places that change the menu often.
- More than one menu
- No Ceylon Cooking mark at the foot
- AI descriptions and translation
- Your own colours and templates
We are not going to invent a Pro price before the thing exists. When it opens, early access sees the number first.
Questions
Good to Know
No. The menu is an ordinary web page. They point the camera at the QR code and it opens in whatever browser is already on the phone. Nothing to install, no account, no app.
Your Menu, Ready Before the Next Service.
Build it now, free and without an account. Join the list separately if you want the hosted QR link when it opens, Sri Lankan kitchens first.