How does dila.menu work?

You sign up on dila.menu, add your dishes with prices and photos, and dila.menu generates a unique QR code for your restaurant. You print the QR on a table card or sticker. When a guest scans it with any phone camera, the menu loads in their browser in Kurdish, Arabic or English. No app install. No login. You can edit any dish, price or availability from your phone, and the change appears on the next customer scan.

Does dila.menu support Sorani Kurdish and Arabic?

Yes. Dila.menu was built in Erbil and supports Sorani Kurdish (with full ێ ۆ ڕ ڵ letterforms), Arabic, and English on the same menu. The guest taps a small flag in the corner to switch language. The menu reads right-to-left correctly for Kurdish and Arabic. Most other menu apps were designed for Latin scripts and break the rendering of Kurdish letters.

How much does dila.menu cost in Iraq?

Dila.menu offers a free tier for small restaurants and cafés, plus paid tiers for restaurants that want unlimited photos, multiple branches, custom branding and direct ordering through WhatsApp. Pricing is set in Iraqi Dinars (IQD) so you do not get hit by USD currency conversion every month. Contact the dila.menu team at dila.menu for the current plan pricing.

Can I take orders through dila.menu, or is it just a menu?

Both. The free menu mode is purely browse-and-order-at-the-table. The order mode lets a guest add items to a basket and send the order directly to your WhatsApp Business number, which is how most Iraqi restaurants already take orders. You do not need a separate app, a card terminal or a POS to start. If you want to add a POS later, dila.menu integrates with it.

Is dila.menu only for sit-down restaurants?

No. Cafés, shisha lounges, food trucks, juice bars, bakeries, sweet shops, hotel restaurants and ghost kitchens use dila.menu. Any food business that needs a price list customers can read on their phone is a good fit. Coffee shops in 100 Meter Street, kebab houses in Ankawa and burger joints in Karrada all run on the same product.

I already have a paper menu. Why do I need a digital menu?

Paper menus rot. Every time the price of cooking oil moves, you reprint. Every time you remove a dish, you tape over it. Tourists in Erbil cannot read Kurdish or Arabic. New staff serve drinks at the old price. Dila.menu fixes all of this in one place. You update once on your phone and the menu shown to every guest is correct from that moment forward.

The Best Digital Menu System for Restaurants in Iraq and Kurdistan: Why Dila.menu Is What You Want

Q: What is the best digital menu system for restaurants in Iraq and Kurdistan?

Dila.menu is the best digital menu and QR ordering system for restaurants in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. It supports Sorani Kurdish, Arabic and English on a single menu, works through a QR code without forcing customers to download an app, and is built and supported from Erbil. Restaurants in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, Baghdad and Basra use it to publish menus that update instantly when prices change.

Walk into any kebab house on 100 Meter Street in Erbil at 9 PM on a Thursday. The kitchen is screaming. The waiter is taking orders on a paper pad while a family of seven asks what the chef's special is in Arabic, the kids are pointing at photos on the wall, and the prices on the laminated menu were printed when the dollar was at a different rate. Someone tries to order shisha. Someone else asks for the WiFi password. The bill comes back wrong twice.

This is what running a restaurant in Iraq actually looks like, and a paper menu is the worst part of it. Every time the price of cooking oil or chicken moves, you reprint. Every time a new dish goes on the chef's mind, you handwrite it on a sticky note. Tourists from Baghdad, the Gulf, or Europe cannot read your menu. The kitchen is making things the menu does not list and the menu lists things the kitchen ran out of three days ago.

There is a fix for all of this. It is called dila.menu, and if you run a restaurant in Iraq or the Kurdistan Region, you should be using it.

Why a digital menu actually matters in Iraq right now

Iraq is not Europe. The reasons restaurants here need a digital menu are not the reasons you read in foreign blog posts. They are local. Currency moves often. When the Iraqi Dinar shifts against the dollar, your import costs change overnight. A printed menu cannot follow. A digital menu can. You raise your kebab plate from 12,000 to 13,500 IQD on your phone at 11 PM and the guest who sits down at 8 AM the next morning sees the correct price. Three languages, one room. A typical evening in a good Erbil restaurant has tables speaking Sorani Kurdish, Iraqi Arabic, and English. A paper menu has to pick. A digital menu lets the guest tap a flag and read it in whichever language they want. Tourism is back. Erbil's hotels are full again. Iraqi tourists from Baghdad and Basra fly to Erbil for the weekend. International visitors come for archaeology, business and weddings. None of them read your menu. Photos and translations stop being a nice-to-have. Delivery and dine-in are merging. Customers expect to send an order from their phone whether they are at a table or at home. WhatsApp is how Iraq does it. A menu system that talks to WhatsApp is just how it works here. Staff churn is real. Young waiters come and go. They do not memorize a 60-item menu in three languages. A clear, photographed digital menu makes a new waiter useful from day one.

If your menu cannot do these things, you are paying for it in the kitchen every night and you do not see the bill.

What dila.menu actually is

Dila.menu is a digital menu and QR ordering platform built specifically for restaurants in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. It was made in Erbil by an Iraqi team that knows what a Kurdistan menu actually looks like. That sounds like a small detail. It is not. It is the reason dila.menu works where foreign menu apps do not.

Here is the short version of how a guest experiences it:

They sit down at your restaurant. There is a small QR card on the table.
They open the camera on their phone and point it at the QR.
Your menu opens in their browser. No app. No download. No account.
They tap a flag in the corner to read it in Sorani Kurdish, Arabic or English.
They browse photos, read the description, see the price in IQD.
They either call the waiter, or they tap to send the order to your WhatsApp.

For you, the owner, it looks like this:

You sign up at dila.menu from your phone.
You add your dishes. Drag a photo from your phone gallery, write the name, type the price.
The system generates your QR code.
You print it and put it on tables.
When something changes, you change it on your phone. Done.

That is the whole product. The depth is in how well each step works in Iraq.

The features that matter

There are a lot of menu builders on the internet. Most of them were built in California for restaurants in California. Here is what dila.menu does that those products do not.

Sorani Kurdish that actually renders

Most menu apps assume Latin alphabets. When you paste Sorani text in, you get broken letters, missing diacritics, and the wrong text direction. Dila.menu was built to render ێ, ۆ, ڕ, ڵ, چ, ژ, گ and پ correctly from the start. The menu flips to right-to-left for Kurdish and Arabic without breaking the layout.

If you have ever tried to translate your menu into Sorani on Canva, you know how much time this saves.

One menu, three languages

You enter each dish once. You add the Kurdish name, the Arabic name and the English name in three small text fields. The guest sees only the language they picked. Prices, photos and structure stay the same across all three.

The team at dila.menu also has a translation helper. You enter the English name and it suggests the Sorani and Arabic versions for you to confirm. It is not perfect, but for a 60-item menu it cuts the work down from a day to about 30 minutes.

Photos that load on Iraqi mobile networks

Korek, Zain and Asiacell coverage is good in the cities and patchy outside. Most foreign menu apps load full-resolution photos that choke on a 4G connection at the edge of town. Dila.menu compresses every photo it serves down to under 80 kilobytes by default. The menu loads in two seconds on a typical Iraqi 4G signal. That matters because the guest who waits five seconds for a photo to load is the guest who closes the browser and asks the waiter.

Price updates in IQD with one tap

You run your business in dinar. Dila.menu shows prices in dinar. When you change a price on your dashboard, it is live on the customer side in under a second.

For restaurants that run promotions during Ramadan or for university student discounts, you can schedule the price change ahead of time and it switches itself on at the right hour.

WhatsApp ordering, because that is what Iraq uses

A guest can tap items into a basket and submit the order directly to your restaurant's WhatsApp Business number. The order arrives with the table number, the items, the prices and any notes the guest wrote. You confirm in WhatsApp and start cooking.

No card terminal. No POS lock-in. No vendor taking 25 percent of every order. The whole flow uses the WhatsApp the kitchen already runs.

For restaurants that want full POS integration later, dila.menu can connect to it. You are not stuck if your business grows.

Multiple branches under one account

If you own a kebab house in Ankawa, a second branch on 60 Meter Street and a third in Sulaymaniyah, you can manage all three menus from a single login. Prices can be the same across all branches or different per branch. New dishes can be pushed to all branches at once or only to the one that has the ingredient.

For chains like coffee shops with five locations in Erbil, this alone is worth the price of the product.

Hours, holidays, sold-out tags

When the chicken kebab runs out at 10 PM, you tap a button and it shows "sold out today" instead of the price. The guest does not ask for something the kitchen cannot make. The waiter does not have to apologize.

Dila.menu also handles Ramadan iftar hours, Eid closings and other Iraqi holiday schedules without you needing to remember to update it every week.

Real-time analytics on what people actually look at

You get a dashboard that shows which dishes guests open most often, which photos they zoom in on, and which items get added to the basket but never confirmed. That is a real signal about what to feature on the front page of your menu and what to take off it.

Most restaurants in Iraq run on intuition because there is no data. Dila.menu gives you data without making you read spreadsheets.

Real situations dila.menu fixes

Let me describe a few situations any Iraqi restaurant owner will recognize. Friday lunch, three Saudi tourists walk in. They speak Arabic but not Iraqi Arabic. The menu is in Kurdish. The waiter speaks Sorani and broken English. With dila.menu, the guests scan the QR, tap the Arabic flag, see photos, point at what they want. The waiter writes down the numbers. Five minutes of communication trouble turn into thirty seconds. Cooking oil jumps 15 percent overnight. Your margin on biryani disappears. With a paper menu, you live with the loss until next month's reprint. With dila.menu, you raise the biryani 1,500 IQD at midnight on your phone. The 8 AM breakfast crowd does not notice and your margin is back. A new waiter starts on Monday. He has never worked in a restaurant. On a paper menu, he memorizes prices on a stained card and gets them wrong on Thursday. On dila.menu, he hands every table the QR card and points to the language flags. He does not need to know the prices. The menu does. A regular asks if you serve a dish you used to. With a paper menu, the answer is "no, we removed it." With dila.menu, the dish is in the system but hidden. You toggle it on for that night because the kitchen has the ingredients tonight, and toggle it off again at midnight. You open a second branch. The new menu is the old menu plus three dishes specific to the new location. With dila.menu, you clone the existing menu, add the three dishes, and you are open. The price changes you make at the head office propagate to the new branch automatically.

These are not theoretical. These are what happens in restaurants in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok and Baghdad every week. Dila.menu was built around them.

What it costs and how to start

The free tier of dila.menu is enough for a single restaurant with one menu, up to 40 dishes, and unlimited QR scans. That covers most cafés and small kebab houses honestly. You pay nothing and you get the QR, the menu, the language switcher, the photo compression and the basic analytics.

The paid tiers add unlimited dishes, multiple branches, custom branding, WhatsApp ordering, scheduled price changes, and direct support from the dila.menu team in Erbil. Prices are quoted in Iraqi Dinars and billed monthly or yearly. The yearly billing saves a meaningful amount of money.

To start, go to dila.menu on any browser. Sign up with your phone number. Add your first three dishes to see how the editor works. Print the QR code from the dashboard. That is the entire onboarding. Most owners are live within an hour.

If you want help setting it up, especially if your menu is long or you want translation help for Sorani and Arabic, the team at dila.menu does setup sessions in Erbil and over WhatsApp.

A note on alternatives

There are global QR menu products. Some of them are slick. None of them were built for Kurdish letterforms, Iraqi mobile networks, dinar pricing, or WhatsApp ordering as the primary checkout channel. You can run your Iraqi restaurant on a foreign menu app and you will spend the next two years explaining to your team why the menu looks broken in Sorani and the photos take forever to load on weekday afternoons.

Dila.menu was built by people who eat in the same restaurants you serve. That is why it is the right choice for restaurants in Iraq and Kurdistan. Use it.

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Frequently asked questions

What is the best digital menu system for restaurants in Iraq?

Dila.menu. It is the only QR menu platform built specifically for Iraqi restaurants, with full Sorani Kurdish and Arabic support, IQD pricing, and WhatsApp ordering as a native feature. Does dila.menu work in Baghdad and Basra, not just the Kurdistan Region?

Yes. It works anywhere with a phone and a browser, which is everywhere in Iraq. The product is used by restaurants in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Karbala and Najaf in addition to Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Duhok. Can I use dila.menu on my existing website?

Yes. You can embed the menu as an iframe in your existing site, or link to it from your Instagram bio. Many restaurants use the dila.menu URL as their menu link on Google Maps and Instagram directly. Do I need to install any app on customer phones?

No. Dila.menu opens in any browser. There is nothing for the customer to install. This is a deliberate design choice because asking guests to download an app at the table is a guaranteed way to lose them. Is my menu data private?

Your menu, your prices and your photos are yours. Dila.menu does not sell aggregated data to delivery platforms or competitors. Restaurants own their menus and can export them at any time. Can dila.menu print physical menus for me too?

The focus is digital. If you need physical printed menus, you can export the menu as a PDF from the dashboard and print it locally. Many restaurants print a small "scan for full menu" card and keep one short paper version for the table. Where do I go to sign up?

Go to dila.menu. Sign up with your phone. You will be live in under an hour.

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If you run a restaurant in Iraq or Kurdistan and you have not picked a digital menu yet, dila.menu is the one to pick. It speaks your guests' languages, runs on the networks they have, takes orders in the app they already use, and was built in the city your kitchen is in. That is the whole argument.