Chinese Takeaway Online Ordering: Set Meals, Dish Numbers & Banquets

Your customers have ordered by number for years. They know No. 42 is the chicken chow mein and No. 118 is the crispy shredded beef. When you move online, do not throw that away and force people to relearn your menu — carry the numbers straight across. Put the dish number in front of the name on every item, so the screen reads exactly like the paper menu on the fridge door.

Organise by section, not one long list. A hundred dishes in a single scroll is a wall. Group them the way the leaflet already does — starters, soups, chicken, beef, duck, seafood, rice & noodles, curries, and chef's specials — with sticky tabs so a customer can jump to "duck" in one tap instead of thumbing past forty other dishes to find it.

• Keep the dish numbers customers order by — lead each item with its number ("42. Chicken Chow Mein") so regulars recognise it instantly and the phone order and the online order match. If your leaflet is numbered, the storefront should be too.
• Build set meals and combos as bundles — the "Dinner for Two" at the bottom of the leaflet is not five separate items, it is one product. Set it up as a bundle at a fixed price and let the customer make the choices inside it — a starter each, two mains, a shared rice — so it orders in one tap rather than five.
• Add a short description where it earns its place — most numbered dishes need nothing more than the name, but a line like "Salt & pepper squid — lightly spiced, with chilli and spring onion" helps a new customer order with confidence and nudges them past the usual chow mein.
• Sort sections by how people actually order — starters and set meals near the top, chef's specials given room to breathe. A long paper menu translates cleanly when the online layout mirrors the ordering habits your regulars already have.

Set meals are where a Chinese takeaway makes its margin. A customer who would have ordered a single main for £7.50 instead takes the Set Meal for Two at £22.90 and walks away feeling they got the better deal — and they did, and so did you. The job online is to make those deals as obvious and as easy to order as they are on the leaflet, and to add a few automatic offers that bring people back direct.

Build the ladder of set meals. A Set Meal for Two at £22.90, a Set Meal for Four at £42.90, and a Banquet at £26.90 a head where the kitchen sends a fixed run of courses. Price each one so it reads as clear value against ordering the dishes separately, and let the customer swap within sensible limits — boneless or on-the-bone, chow mein or fried rice — without turning it into a free-for-all.

• Run meal deals and collection discounts automatically — "£5 off when you spend £40", or "10% off collection orders". Set the rule once and it applies itself at checkout. No codes to type, no code to explain over the phone, no customer emailing to ask why the discount did not come off.
• Use first-order and midweek offers to build the habit — free prawn crackers on a first direct order, or 15% off on a quiet Tuesday and Wednesday. Small incentives that cost little but pull a Friday-only customer into ordering midweek, and pull an aggregator customer onto your own storefront.
• Keep the margin the aggregators take — the same banquet on a delivery app can hand 25-35% straight to the platform. On your own storefront that money stays with you. On a £42.90 Set Meal for Four, that is roughly £11 to £15 back in your pocket on every order.
• Set a minimum order that protects delivery runs — a £15 minimum on delivery, or a per-zone minimum for the streets further out, keeps a single spring roll from tying up a driver. Combined with set meals, it nudges small orders up to something worth sending out.

Most complaints on a Chinese takeaway are not about the cooking — they are about the detail. Boiled rice arrives when they wanted fried. The curry sauce is poured over instead of on the side. Someone with a nut allergy did not get told what was safe. Get the choices captured accurately at the point of ordering and half your Saturday-night problems disappear before they start.

Put the choices on the dish, not in a phone call. Add modifier groups to each item so the customer picks boiled or fried rice, sets the spice level, asks for sauce on the side, or flags "no nuts" as they order. A free-text box catches the rest — "extra crispy", "ring the buzzer twice". It all lands on the ticket exactly as they built it, so nothing gets lost in a shouted order across a hot kitchen.

• Capture allergen and no-nut notes clearly — show your allergen information against the menu and give customers a plain way to flag an allergy on the order. It meets UK labelling expectations and, more importantly, it keeps someone safe on a busy night when the kitchen has forty tickets on the go.
• Set prep and lead times so the rush spreads out — tell customers a realistic wait — 40 minutes for collection, an hour for delivery on a Saturday — and let them order ahead for a later slot. Instead of fifty tickets all landing at 7pm, orders arrive across bookable time slots the kitchen can actually keep up with.
• Throttle orders when the kitchen is at capacity — cap how many orders you accept per slot so you never take more than you can cook. When a slot is full it simply pushes the next order to the following one, which protects your quality and your wait times on the busiest nights.
• Run a kitchen display to survive Friday and Saturday — every order on a live screen, sorted by status, with a Set Meal for Four itemised and all its choices spelled out. No smudged paper tickets, no shouting the same order twice. Mark each one preparing then ready as it moves through the pass.
• Keep the phone free with automatic updates — a confirmation and an "out for delivery" message means fewer "where's my order?" calls tying up the line while you are trying to cook. The customer knows where their food is without ringing, and the kitchen keeps moving.

The takeaways that cope best with the weekend are the ones that decided the detail in advance — the choices on every dish, a realistic wait time, a cap per slot, and one screen the whole kitchen works from. Set that up once on a quiet afternoon and Friday night runs the way it should: busy, but under control.