Hospitality · 6 min read
Multilingual Restaurant Websites: When English Is a Must and When It Isn’t
Does a traditional Viennese restaurant need an English website? It depends on where it stands. The place near Stephansplatz loses tables to the house next door every evening it has no English menu online. The neighbourhood inn in a residential part of the 22nd district can probably skip the translation. Between those two cases lies a decision many owners make by gut feeling, even though it can be answered quite soberly. And whoever decides in favour of English should know a few traps, first among them the machine-translated menu.
Answer the location question honestly
English is a must when a noticeable share of your guests does not speak German and should not have to. That applies to restaurants in Vienna’s inner districts, in Salzburg’s old town, in Innsbruck, in the tourist regions of the provinces, and equally to places near hotels, convention centres, or companies with international staff. The tourism figures show the scale: of the just over 20 million overnight stays in Vienna in 2025, around 83 percent came from abroad, according to WienTourismus. If you regularly see groups standing outside in summer with a maps app and a questioning look, you already have your answer.
A second look at your own data pays off: which countries do your Google reviews come from? In which language do reservation emails arrive? If English shows up regularly, those guests are also typing English search terms into Google beforehand, and that is where it is decided whether they find your website at all.
What needs translating, and what doesn’t
Multilingual does not mean running every page twice. For international guests, four things matter: the menu with prices, the opening hours, the address with directions, and the reservation. If those four work in English, ninety percent of the job is done.
The history of the house, the blog, the job ads: all skippable. It is perfectly fine for the English version of your site to be leaner than the German one. Worse than a small English site is a large one that is half translated and dumps the guest back into German halfway through booking a table.
The menu: translating means explaining, not replacing
The menu is where machine translators produce the most embarrassing mistakes, and everyone has seen photos of menus with unintentionally comic English. The ground rule: the dish name stays, the description explains. A Tafelspitz is still called Tafelspitz on the English menu, with “boiled beef with root vegetables, apple-horseradish and chive sauce” underneath. That is also exactly how the guest will order: pointing at the Austrian name, which the waiter understands.
Translate the names away and you lose twice: the guest cannot order at the table what they read online, and the menu loses its character. Kaiserschmarrn rendered as “Emperor’s nonsense” is not a service improvement, it is a screenshot that ends up on Reddit. The same logic applies to the 14 allergens, by the way: the letter codes work in any language; only the legend needs an English version.
Translation widget or a real language version?
The tempting shortcut is an automatic translation widget that converts the whole page at the press of a button. In fairness, it is better than nothing: opening hours and the address usually come through correctly. But it has two serious weaknesses. First, menu quality, see above. Second, findability: automatically translated content generally does not exist for Google as pages of its own, so someone searching in English for “traditional austrian restaurant vienna” will not find you through it.
A real English language version has its own addresses, such as your-domain.at/en, which Google can index separately and show to English-speaking searchers. Technically, so-called hreflang annotations tell the search engine which language version belongs to which audience; that is your website provider’s job, not yours. As an owner, it is enough to know what to ask for: separate URLs per language, not just a toggle button.
More than two languages? Usually not
Italian, French, maybe Spanish: the thought suggests itself when the summer guests come from everywhere. Our experience argues against it. Every additional language is one more menu that has to be updated at every price change and every seasonal switch, and that is exactly where it fails: after a year, the third language is out of date, and a wrong menu is worse than none.
English is the shared language of travellers, including the Italian and French ones. Vienna’s 2025 tourism figures back this up: the largest source markets are Germany, Austria, and, in third place, the USA. With German and English you cover the top of that list directly. German plus English, both kept current, beat four languages of which two are stale. A sensible exception is a restaurant with one clearly dominant origin market, say a ski resort town with a largely Dutch regular crowd.
Source: WienTourismus / City of Vienna, tourism results 2025
Maintenance effort decides the question
Which brings us to the real crux: a bilingual website is only as good as its upkeep. If every change has to be commissioned twice through an agency, the English menu will be the first casualty of everyday business. The language question is therefore also a systems question: can you keep both versions current yourself, in one place, in one pass?
GuestMaker websites are built for German and English from the start, with separate addresses per language and a dashboard where you maintain both versions of the menu yourself. From €99 a month, with no down payment, hosting and reservation system included.