You printed those table tent cards six weeks ago. Nice card stock, your logo in the corner, a QR code front and center that says "Scan for Menu." It points to a PDF you uploaded to Google Drive. And it worked fine until you updated your weekend brunch prices, realized you'd need to regenerate the PDF, re-upload it, and hope the sharing link didn't change.
It changed. Now half your tables are linking to a "request access" screen, and the Saturday brunch crowd is just asking servers for a paper menu anyway.
The QR code itself isn't the problem. The destination is.
A PDF is a dead end
The instinct makes sense: you already have your menu as a PDF, so you link to it. But PDFs are hostile to phones. They load slowly, require pinch-zooming, and don't reflow to fit a screen. Worse, most of the free hosting options (Google Drive, Dropbox, random file-upload sites) generate URLs that break when you update the file, change your storage plan, or hit a sharing permission you forgot about.
Even if the link stays alive, the experience is bad. Someone standing over a table squinting at a two-column PDF that was designed for letter-size paper is not having a good time. They're having a "just tell me what the specials are" moment.
Point the code at something that acts like a menu
What works better is a mobile-friendly page that actually behaves the way a menu should on a phone: readable without zooming, loads in under a second or two, and easy to update without reprinting anything.
You have a few solid options here. If you're already on Square, Toast, or a similar POS system, most of them offer a hosted online menu page. That URL is stable, it's formatted for mobile, and when you 86 the halibut or change your Friday specials, the page updates in the same place you're already managing your menu. No new PDF. No re-uploading.
If you're running a Squarespace or Wix site, a dedicated /menu page works just as well. You control it, it matches your branding, and you can update it in the same CMS you already know. The key is that you're pointing your QR code at a living URL, not a static file.
This is where dynamic QR codes earn their keep, by the way. If you realize three months after printing those tent cards that your Square menu page is a better destination than your Wix page, you just update the redirect. The printed code stays the same. No reprinting, no peeling stickers off acrylic stands.
The table question nobody asks early enough
Here's something that might not occur to you until you're already running QR codes across a dining room: are all your tables getting the same use?
If you use one QR code for every table, you'll see total scan counts, but you won't know anything about where those scans come from within your space. Create a separate code for each table (or at least each section: patio, bar, main dining room) and suddenly your scan analytics tell you something useful. Maybe the patio tables scan three times as often as the indoor ones. Maybe the bar barely gets scanned at all because people there just ask the bartender.
I'm not sure this matters for every restaurant. A six-table cafe probably doesn't need per-table analytics. But if you've got a 40-seat dining room plus a patio plus a bar, knowing which zones actually use the QR menu can change how you think about service flow, staffing, even where you put specials signage.
It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that compounds. You start noticing patterns: weekday lunch scans peak differently than weekend dinner. The corner booth section barely scans, maybe because the lighting is terrible and the code is hard to read there. That's not just QR data. That's operational data dressed up as a scan count.
Keep the codes alive longer than the menu
Menus change. Restaurants change. The code you printed on those tent cards should survive all of it. This is the part that burns people the most with free QR generators: you create a code, print it on something semi-permanent, and six months later the generator's free tier expires or the link rots. Now you're reprinting.
Physical permanence deserves digital permanence. That's why it matters to pick a provider whose codes keep working no matter what, even if you cancel or delete your account. A laminated table card has a longer shelf life than most SaaS subscriptions. Your QR code should too.
The actual checklist
Get your menu onto a mobile-friendly URL you control. Point a dynamic QR code at it. If you have more than a handful of tables, consider per-section or per-table codes so your scan data tells you something real. And pick a QR provider that won't let the code die when you forget to renew.
That's it. The rest is just lunch.
If you want to set this up in a few minutes, start here.