Do you need your menu in English? Here is what our own numbers say

Most articles about translating a restaurant menu open with a guess: "tourists are an important part of your business". We can do better than a guess, because we can count.

Nine days, 17,411 menus, 31 languages

Between 26 July and 3 August 2026 — peak season — the menus published on FlyMenu were opened 17,411 times by 1,771 visitors from 55 countries. Most of those restaurants are in Venice and its mainland, so this is what a tourist city actually looks like from behind the counter.

The interesting column is not the country. It is the language the guest's phone is set to, because that is the language the menu was actually shown in:

Phone language	Share of visitors
English	35%
Italian	20%
German	11%
French	8%
Spanish	6%
Dutch	3%
25 other languages	17%

Four out of five people opened the menu on a phone that was not set to Italian. Over nine days we counted 31 distinct languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Russian and Ukrainian.

Printing an Italian menu with an English translation on the facing page covers 55% of that room. The rest is served by a waiter pointing at photographs.

Why "English is enough" stopped being true

English is the single largest group, and if you only ever do one translation, do that one. But the number that should decide your setup is the other one: German, French, Spanish and Dutch together are worth more than English alone — 28% against 35% — and they arrive in different weeks of the season.

A printed menu forces you to bet on which languages are worth the print run, before the season starts. A digital menu does not ask you to bet. The guest's phone announces its language, and the menu answers in it.

The part that actually costs you money: allergens

Regulation (EU) 1169/2011 requires the 14 allergens to be indicated. Every serious platform handles that, so it is not a reason to choose one over another.

The reason to think carefully is what happens after you change a recipe. If your translations are done by hand — a translator, an agency, a member of staff who speaks German — then changing the oil you fry in updates the Italian and leaves the German wrong. An allergen that is wrong is worse than an allergen that is missing: the guest reads it, believes it, and eats it.

This is why automatic translation and allergens have to be looked at together, not as two separate lines on a price list. On FlyMenu they are updated in the same action, because they are the same record.

What this looks like in practice

You write the dish once, in Italian. You tag the allergens on that dish. The guest scans the QR code at the table, with no app to install, and reads it in the language their phone is set to. When you change the price or the recipe, every language changes with it, in seconds, with no reprint.

For the first 21 days a new venue has the Premium features switched on. After that it simply stays on the free plan, with nothing to cancel.

Before you take anyone's word for it, including ours

The numbers above are ours, and they describe restaurants that already chose us — so read them as what a tourist city looks like, not as proof that any one platform is best. What you can do is count your own room: any decent platform will tell you which languages your guests' phones are set to. If yours does not, that is the question to ask before you pay for anything.

Figures measured 26 July – 3 August 2026 on menus published with FlyMenu, mostly in Venice and Mestre. Language is the browser language of the device, which is also the language the menu was served in.

You can try it on your own venue: the free plan does not ask for a card. There is also a price comparison of the platforms available in Italy if you want to see where everyone sits.