One hall, ten kitchens, one way of showing them
A food hall’s QR landing page is a grid of its kitchens, and the grid is the hall’s shopfront rather than each vendor’s. Three card formats, chosen once by the hall, applied to every kitchen — including the ones that have not uploaded a photo.
Scan the code on a table in a food hall and the first thing you should see is the hall: every kitchen trading today, in one grid, each one a tap away from its menu. That grid is the most valuable screen in the building and it is the one most often left to chance.
Why it goes wrong
The grid is usually assembled from whatever each vendor has uploaded. One has a professional photograph of a burger. One has a logo on a white square. One joined last week and has nothing. The result is not a shopfront, it is a noticeboard — and the kitchen with the best photograph gets the trade, which has nothing to do with the food.
The hall decides, not the vendor
In our system the format of the vendor card is a hall-level setting. Pick it once and every kitchen is drawn the same way. Three choices:
- Logo and photo — the card splits, with the kitchen's mark on a coloured panel on one side and its food photograph on the other, and the name underneath. This is the default, and it is the one that survives a kitchen with a weak photograph or no logo, because the panel falls back to the name set in the kitchen's own brand colours.
- Photo only — a full-bleed picture with the name beneath. Best when every kitchen has been photographed to the same standard.
- Name only — a coloured tile with the name. Deliberately plain, and the right answer for a hall of small independents where photographs would be uneven.
The setting is one choice on the hall's screen, with each option drawn as it will look rather than described in words, and a live preview of a real kitchen beside it.
The point of a fallback
Every one of the three has to look deliberate when a kitchen has supplied nothing. That is not a corner case in a hall — it is the first week of every new trader. A card that shows a grey box with a broken-image icon tells a guest that the kitchen is not really open.
So the logo panel draws the kitchen's name as a wordmark in its own colours when there is no logo file, and the photo half falls back to the hall's own imagery. A new kitchen looks like part of the hall on its first day and gets a better card as it uploads more, rather than looking broken until somebody chases it.
Worth checking on yours
Open your hall's QR page on a phone, not a laptop, and look at the weakest card rather than the best one. If one kitchen looks unfinished, every guest who scans that code today sees it, and the kitchen loses covers to a photograph rather than to a menu.