How to put your restaurant menu on a TV screen

Digital menu boards used to mean proprietary signage hardware, a content management contract, and a technician visit when anything changed. For a counter service spot, a cafe, or a bar, that is a lot of machinery for what is ultimately one job: show the menu, large, on a screen.

If your menu is published with Menu Author, that job takes one URL. Here is the whole setup, plus the design details that separate a readable board from a squint test.

What you need

A published menu. Any Menu Author menu with a public URL works.
A screen with a web browser: a smart TV, a TV with a streaming stick that has a browser, a spare tablet, or any computer plugged into a display.

That is genuinely the list. There is no app to install and no signage subscription.

Step 1: Get the display link

Every published menu has a display mode at its public URL with /display appended. You will find it in the Share dialog, where you can copy the link or open a preview in a new tab. Open that link on the screen’s browser and the menu fills the display edge to edge: no filter bar, no scrolling, no browser chrome once you go fullscreen. Just the menu.

Step 2: Let the pages rotate

If your menu has multiple pages, the display advances through them automatically. The rotation speed is a slider in the share dialog, anywhere from 5 to 90 seconds per page, and your choice is baked into the URL itself. That means the TV needs nothing configured on its end; the link carries the setting.

A useful rule of thumb: read the densest page out loud at a relaxed pace, then add a few seconds. If a guest in line cannot finish the page before it flips, it is rotating too fast.

Step 3: Walk to the back of the room

Menu boards fail at distance, not up close. Stand where your furthest guest stands and check:

Type size. Item names should be readable across the room; descriptions can be smaller, but if a description matters at the counter, say it in fewer words instead of shrinking the font.
Contrast. Dark text on a light background, or the reverse, holds up under the room’s lighting. Subtle tone on tone combinations that look elegant in print wash out on a glowing screen. Test any combination with the free menu contrast checker.
Fewer columns. A layout that works on a printed page can be too dense for a screen. Two columns is usually the ceiling for a TV.

All of this is theme work, not TV work: pick or tune a theme with screen distance in mind, and the display link simply shows it.

Keeping it current

The display page quietly reloads itself every few minutes. Change a price, republish, and the screen picks it up on its own; nobody climbs behind the TV with a remote. The same published menu also feeds your QR code, your website embed, and your web link, so the board can never disagree with the menu in a guest’s hand.

You can also preview the latest draft of the display before you publish it, so a menu overhaul does not go live on the big screen until you have seen it.

What about a TV with no browser (or a USB stick)?

Some older TVs have no browser but will happily play a photo slideshow from a USB stick. That works in a pinch: export your menu pages as PNG or JPEG images from Menu Author, copy them onto the stick, and set the TV’s slideshow to loop. The catch is that a USB menu is frozen; change a price and someone has to re-export, re-copy, and re-plug. You also lose control of the rotation timing on most TVs.

If the screen will show the menu every day, a basic streaming stick with a browser costs about as much as a nice dinner and gets you the live version: automatic updates, paced rotation, and nothing to re-copy. Save the USB trick for the TV in the back room or a one-off event.

A note on hardware

Any browser works, but screens that run all day deserve two settings checks: turn off the TV’s screen saver and sleep timer, and if the browser offers a fullscreen or kiosk mode, use it so no toolbar creeps back after a reboot. If you are buying something for the purpose, a basic streaming stick with a browser, or the cheapest tablet you can mount, does the job; the intelligence lives in the link, not the device.

Ten minutes, one URL, and the screen above the counter finally earns its place. Start free, publish, and point a browser at /display.