A restaurant website has one job on a Friday at six o’clock: tell a hungry stranger whether you are open, what you are serving and how to get hold of you. Almost every widget sold to hospitality is a distraction from those three questions.
So this is not a list of a hundred. It is five that pay their way, two that usually do not, and a straight answer about which tools build them properly. We make one of them, which you should factor in accordingly.
1. Opening hours, live
The single highest-value widget on a venue site, and the one most often done badly. Typed into the page as text, hours are wrong within a fortnight: a bank holiday, a private hire, a kitchen closing an hour early in January.
What separates a real hours widget from a table of times is whether it understands how hospitality actually works. Split services, so the kitchen closing at nine does not imply the bar has. Bank holidays applied automatically rather than remembered. One-off closures set in advance. A visible open or closed status rather than a grid the visitor has to interpret while walking.
- Must have: a live open/closed state, not just a list of times
- Must have: separate kitchen and bar services
- Should have: automatic UK bank holidays
- Nice to have: a next-change line, so "closes in 40 minutes" is obvious
2. The menu
The most-visited page on any restaurant site, and the one most likely to be a PDF link that downloads instead of opening. The question worth asking of any menu widget is not how it looks, it is where the content comes from.
Most widget builders make you type the menu in again, dish by dish, inside their editor. That is fine on day one and a disaster by week six, because your printed menu and your website menu are now two separate pieces of work maintained by two different people, and only one of them gets updated when the specials change.
The alternative is a widget that takes the file you already have. You send a PDF to the printer anyway. That same file should become the website menu, so there is one thing to update, not two. That is what our PDF menu widget does, and it is the reason we built it.
3. An enquiry form that goes somewhere
Not a booking system. A booking system is a different product and if you need one, buy one. An enquiry form is for the things a table-booking widget cannot take: a party of fourteen, a wake, a Christmas do, a private dining room, a supplier who wants the manager.
The failure mode here is boring and expensive: forms that deliver to an inbox nobody opens. Whatever you use, check the routing before you check the styling.
4. A QR code you can repoint
Every table tent, window sticker and beer mat with a printed QR code on it is a small bet that the URL behind it will never change. It always changes.
A dynamic QR code encodes a stable short link and lets you change the destination afterwards, which turns a reprint into a dashboard edit. If you print anything at all, this is the widget that quietly saves the most money.
5. Venue information, in one place
Address, phone, parking, step-free access, whether the dog is allowed in. Individually trivial, collectively the difference between someone coming and someone not bothering. Worth a structured block rather than a paragraph in the footer, because that is also what search engines read.
Two that usually are not worth it
Social feeds. An Instagram feed embedded on a restaurant site is a link out of your website into somebody else’s. It loads slowly, it dates fast when posting stops for a month, and it answers none of the three questions at the top of this page.
Live chat. Unless someone is genuinely watching it during service, a chat widget is a promise you break. A phone number and an enquiry form are more honest.
Who builds them
Honestly: it depends whether you want range or fit.
- Elfsight is the broadest of the general-purpose builders, with an app for very nearly everything and a large library to draw on. Billed per widget, so a venue wanting hours plus a menu plus a form is buying three things.
- Common Ninja covers a similarly wide range and is comfortable to set up. Their plans are built around monthly pageviews, which is worth understanding before a busy weekend.
- POWR is the same shape again: general-purpose, well established, strong at forms and popups.
- Jotform is the one to beat on forms specifically. If all you need is an enquiry form and nothing else, it is a perfectly sensible answer.
- Foldout, which is us, does hospitality only. Every widget a venue needs, one price per workspace, no per-widget fees and no view caps. Narrower than any of the above on purpose.
If you need an Instagram feed, a countdown timer and a currency converter, a general widget marketplace is the right call and we would tell you so. If what you actually keep is hours, a menu, a form and a QR code, a hospitality-specific tool will do those four better than a platform serving every industry at once.
The test that matters
Whatever you choose, run one check before you commit. Open your own website on your own phone, on mobile data rather than the venue wifi, and try to answer three questions in under thirty seconds: are they open, what are they serving, how do I contact them.
If you cannot, no widget on any list fixes that on its own. If you can, you probably need fewer widgets than anyone is trying to sell you.
Comparison details checked 28 July 2026. Everyone’s plans and app lists change, so check theirs and ours before deciding.