For restaurants & takeaways
Social media for a restaurant, from someone who knows you are busy
There are roughly seventy thousand restaurants and takeaways in the UK and most are independent. You have better raw material than any other trade and less time than any of them. The answer is not posting more — it is taking three photographs during prep and deciding once a week.
01 · Plan the year
The British trading calendar
Covers are won on dates, and the British dates are not the ones the international advice assumes. Mothering Sunday is in March. Pancake day is a trading day. Bank holiday Sundays behave like Saturdays. Get these right and you are ahead of most of your street.
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The summer bank holiday, Monday 31 August 2026
The Sunday behaves like a Saturday and the Monday is a full trading day. Staff and stock accordingly.
Post The Tuesday before. People plan a long weekend on a Wednesday, not on the Friday night.
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Christmas party bookings, October and early November
Group bookings for December are taken eight weeks out. A December party campaign is a campaign for next December.
Post From the first week of October, with a deposit and a set menu ready to send.
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Black Friday, 27 November 2026, and Small Business Saturday, 5 December
Gift vouchers, not discounts on a service you are about to run at capacity.
Post The Monday of that week, and again on the Thursday.
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The week between Christmas and New Year
Nobody knows who is open. That is the whole opportunity and it takes one post.
Post The 20th of December, and pin it.
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January and February
The quiet quarter, which is precisely when the reminding has to happen and precisely when most places go silent.
Post Throughout, and lean on Veganuary and Dry January if they suit you — both are genuine UK behaviour changes, not marketing inventions.
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Shrove Tuesday, 9 February 2027
A trading day for anybody who can put a pancake on a menu, not a novelty post.
Post The Friday before, with the actual dish and the actual price.
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Mothering Sunday, 7 March 2027
One of the biggest covers days of the year for UK restaurants, and nowhere near the American Mother's Day in May.
Post Open bookings six weeks out, from late January. It sells out early and the people who miss it are annoyed.
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Easter, Good Friday 26 March to Easter Monday 29 March 2027
Four consecutive trading days including two bank holidays, and in 2027 the clocks go forward on the Sunday in the middle of it.
Post Three weeks out. Say your hours for all four days in one post.
How to actually do the planning
- Put the eight dates above in the diary now, with a reminder three weeks before each. That is your whole trading calendar and it took ten minutes.
- Decide the offer before you write the post. "Mother's Day bookings now open, three courses £34.50, sittings at 12 and 3" is a post. "Happy Mother's Day" is not.
- Everything else is what you cooked that week. If you have a special, post it the day before and again the morning of — nobody decides where to eat tonight at nine in the morning, but they notice at eleven and book at four.
02 · What to post
Eight things you could photograph this week
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The prep shot, not the plated one
Everyone posts the finished plate. Almost nobody posts the tray of pastry at seven in the morning, and it is the one people stop for.
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The special, priced
With the price. Posts that hide the price get looked at; posts with the price get booked.
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One supplier, by name
The bakery, the farm, the roaster. Local suppliers reshare, which puts you in front of their followers for nothing.
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The dish you are retiring
Two weeks' notice. It is the most reliable urgency you will ever have and it is completely honest.
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A table at a quiet time
"Two free at six tonight." Same principle as the salon's empty chair, and it works for the same reason.
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The person who made it
Chef, KP, the person on the pass. Small places win on being places with people in them.
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What is on for the bank holiday
Post it the Tuesday before. People plan the long weekend on a Wednesday.
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The mistake, occasionally
The loaf that collapsed. It buys more goodwill than ten perfect plates and it costs nothing but nerve.
03 · How often
How often, realistically
Four or five a week if you can, but the honest floor is three, and they should cluster before the days you need covers rather than spread evenly.
Post the specials the day before and the morning of. Nobody decides where to eat tonight at nine in the morning, but they do notice at eleven and book at four.
Take the photographs during prep, when the light is good and nobody is waiting. Service is not the time and you will not do it.
04 · Take a better photograph
How to photograph food without a studio
Food photography has a reputation for needing equipment. It does not — it needs a window and thirty seconds before service, which is the one thing a kitchen genuinely struggles to find. Both frames below are the same dish, on the same plate, ten minutes apart.
Illustrative examples, generated rather than photographed in a real business.
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Never shoot under service lighting
Warm overhead lights are flattering to a room and ruinous to food: everything goes orange, greens go grey, and a rare steak looks cooked. Carry the plate to the nearest window and shoot it there. Ten seconds of walking beats any amount of editing afterwards, and no filter has ever rescued a photograph taken under a heat lamp.
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Light from behind or the side, never from the front
Stand so the window is behind the plate or to one side of it. Light coming across food catches the texture — the crumb, the glaze, the char — which is the entire reason anyone wants to eat it. Light coming from behind you flattens the plate into a diagram.
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Get down to plate height
Shot from directly above, a burger is a bun. Shot from the side, it is a burger. As a rule: anything with height is shot from the side, anything flat — a pizza, a board, a bowl of soup — is shot from above. Almost every disappointing restaurant photograph is a tall dish shot from the wrong angle.
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One plate, nothing else
The napkin, the check, the cloth, the corner of a tray. Everything in the frame that is not the food is competing with the food. Wipe the rim of the plate while you are there — a phone camera sees a thumbprint of sauce that your eye does not.
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Shoot it before it is ready to eat
Food has about ninety seconds. Take the photograph before the sauce sets, before the herbs wilt, before the ice cream goes. In practice that means photographing during prep or on the first plate of the service, not on the one going out to table nine.
05 · The UK part
The British specifics
- Mothering Sunday — 7 March 2027 — is one of the biggest covers days of the UK restaurant year and it is nowhere near the American Mother's Day in May. Every international guide gets this wrong, which is exactly why it is worth being right about.
- Displaying your food hygiene rating is a legal requirement in Wales and Northern Ireland and voluntary in England; Scotland runs a different scheme entirely. If you have a five, show it — and note that the Food Standards Agency has proposed making display mandatory in England, so this may change.
- Natasha's Law has applied across the UK since 1 October 2021: food prepacked for direct sale needs the name of the food and a full ingredients list with the fourteen allergens emphasised. Posting about how you handle allergens is both useful and genuinely reassuring.
- Christmas Day 2027 falls on a Saturday, which produces substitute bank holidays on the 27th and 28th. It is an unusual year and worth staffing early for.
- Bank holiday Sundays trade like Saturdays. Say you are open — people genuinely do not know, and the assumption costs more covers than any other single thing in this list.
06 · Mistakes
What not to do
- Photographs taken under service lighting. Everything goes orange and the food looks worse than it is. Move it to a window for ten seconds.
- Posting the menu as a PDF. It is unreadable on a phone, it does not appear in search, and it is the single most common mistake in the trade.
- Going silent between January and March. It is the quiet quarter, which is precisely when the reminding has to happen.
07 · And then, us
And then, the part we do
Everything above needs a window and no money. This is the pitch, and it is one plate photographed once. You did not cook it again. All that changes across the three is how far the assistant is allowed to go.
Layout Pro
The words and the panels go on top. The photograph underneath is exactly the one you took.
The special, priced, out at eleven in the morning.
Visual Artist
Your subject is kept as it is, and the setting around it is replaced.
The gap-filler. Same food, a table people can imagine sitting at.
Image Maestro
Your subject is locked, then a new scene is built around it from a different angle.
The occasion post, written in January for March.
Illustrative examples, generated rather than photographed in a real business.
One post, whichever you pick.
Where it stops being three posts and starts being a campaign
The Christmas party run is the one that pays for the year, and it has to start in October when you are least able to think about December. A campaign is that whole sequence written once — the early one that opens the diary, the set-menu one, the deposit-deadline one, the two-tables-left one on the 15th of December — dated and queued so it goes out while you are on the pass. Restaurants do not miss that revenue because they do not know; they miss it because October is October.
Or let it write them for you.
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