A Tavola: a free digital menu for restaurants during lockdown
In 2020, together with a small team, I conceived and built a free app to browse restaurant menus from home and at the table. With no ads and no subscription, it reached about 50,000 downloads across Italy.
At a glance
- Timeline: March 2020 (idea) to May 2020 (release on the stores)
- My role: product concept and Flutter app development
- Working with me: Domenico Miranda (Flutter development) and Massimiliano Massaro (backend)
- Model: free, with no subscription and no ads
- Outcome: about 50,000 downloads, covered by AndriaViva and TraniViva
Context
In March 2020 the lockdown forced restaurants to close. For owners this meant idle kitchens against unchanged fixed costs (utilities, rent, payroll) and stock close to its use-by date. For consumers, weeks spent at home had turned dinner into a routine.
A Tavola ("At the table") started as a personal initiative, with no client behind it.
Goal
A free tool with two complementary functions:
- Remote browsing: a map of nearby restaurants, each with its own menu, to choose and order a delivery.
- Contactless menu: once restaurants reopened, guests could read the menu at the table on their own phone, with no paper menus passed from hand to hand.
Team and timeline
Domenico Miranda, later CEO of appBakery, and I built the app in Flutter; Massimiliano Massaro handled the backend. At the time appBakery was still a plan: the company had not yet been incorporated.
The work ran alongside other commitments: university lectures in the morning, web development work in the afternoon, A Tavola in the evening and at night. The app was ready for release in mid-May 2020, in step with restaurants reopening.
The key decision: a QR code with a deep link for every restaurant
Each restaurant was given a unique QR code to display on the tables or at the entrance. The code carried a deep link: scanning it with the camera opened the app directly on that restaurant's page, with no searching and no intermediate steps.
Alongside it came geolocation, the technical component I am proudest of. Restaurants were integrated on Google Maps: near a participating venue, the app recognised it automatically and showed its menu, even without scanning the QR code. Google Maps integration and deep links were new technologies to me, which I picked up during the project.
A back office inside the app
The decision that took the most time was building the restaurant owners' management panel into the same mobile app, rather than into a separate web application.
The flow had three steps. Owners claimed their venue starting from its Google Maps listing; after we verified it, they generated the QR code; finally they uploaded the menu, with categories, dishes (description, photos, allergens and nutritional values) and opening hours.
The reasoning was practical: many restaurant owners don't have a computer, or prefer to work from their phone. Updating a dish's photo or changing its price took a few steps and no reprinting, which also meant less paper.
A fully free model
A Tavola had no subscription, no cost for restaurants and no ads. It was not a given that the market was ready, nor that a free service would be trusted at a time when several companies were making substantial profits from the emergency. The aim was to make a concrete contribution to a sector at a standstill.
Results
The project was covered by AndriaViva and TraniViva (in Italian). Some of the reviews left on the stores:
Hats off to the developers, really. A godsend, especially right now, for us restaurant owners and for all the customers who can see our menus right on their phones. Thanks again for this free initiative, which has been extremely useful from day one.
Sebasololalazio · App Store, translated from Italian
Great app, easy to use, user-friendly, intuitive, fast and above all really, really useful!
Lorenzocasafina · App Store, translated from Italian
Great app, well made. Congratulations
Sabino Monterisi, Capomulino (Andria) · Google Play, translated from Italian
Starting from Andria and Trani, the app spread beyond the province to users across almost all of Italy, with about 50,000 downloads in total: well beyond our expectations.
Evolution and closure
To decide how the product should evolve, we asked users whether they would like to book or order directly in the app. The response was lukewarm: in my view, new features were seen as a sign that the free service was about to end.
The app therefore stayed as it was. When the emergency ended, paper menus came back and home delivery consolidated on platforms such as Glovo and Just Eat. A Tavola is no longer available on the stores.
What remains
If one thing should remain from this project, I would like it to be this: in a difficult time, I tried to give restaurant owners concrete help.