.menu Domain: The Ending That Puts the Food List in the Address
.menu entered the root zone on 13 November 2013 under an ICANN registry agreement dated 11 September 2013, and the contracting party is Dot Menu Registry LLC of Beverly Hills. The registry describes the extension as a shared space for restaurant menus, venue details, recipes and ingredient or dietary information. As of 12 August 2026 the zone holds 6,948 registrations.
Restaurants, cafés, hotels, catering firms, chefs, food writers and menu-building tools all register here. There is no eligibility test: the registry publishes acceptable use, reserved name and dispute policies, but asks for no trading licence or kitchen registration. Try candidates on the .menu domain search screen, or look at the .cafe page if the venue itself is the brand.
The extension announces its contents before anyone clicks: a visitor who sees venue.menu already knows what is behind it. That produces a clear decision rule — use it alongside your main corporate address, not instead of it. A QR code on the table, a sign in the window, a social profile and a booking message all need a short address that survives being read aloud, and a menu page is exactly that job. Keep the corporate address as it is and point this one at the menu.
.MENU Domain at a Glance
- Registry operator Dot Menu Registry LLC (United States)
- Root zone entry 13 November 2013
- Eligibility None; no trading licence requested
- Zone size 6,948 registrations (12 August 2026)
- Document Requirement No documents are required to register a .menu domain
- Character Length 3 - 63 characters
- Registration Period 1 - 10 years
- Name Server Count 2 - 10 servers
.menu Domain Prices — No Surprise Fees
Registration, transfer and renewal fees are listed separately. The renewal price can differ from the first-year price, so you see both up front.
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New Registration
$41.20 /year -
Transfer
$41.99 /year -
Renewal
$45.99 /year -
Restore
$156.29 -
Late Renewal
$9.08
Included With Every .menu Domain
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Free DNS management
Change A, MX, TXT and CNAME records yourself from the panel — no waiting on anyone when you move a site or mailbox.
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Domain lock
While the lock is on, nobody can move your domain to another registrar without your approval.
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Domain forwarding
Point the domain at your existing site, a campaign page or a social profile — at no extra cost.
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Free WHOIS privacy
Your name, address and phone stay out of public WHOIS records, which cuts down spam and scam calls.
.menu Domain Lifecycle
What happens day by day after it expires
Day 0 is the domain's expiry dateIn short: your .menu domain is put on Client Hold on its expiry date, so the site and e-mail stop that same day. You can still renew during the first 20 days, but from this point a late renewal fee is added on top of the renewal price. On day 20 the registration is deleted and until day 50 only a paid restore brings it back. Nothing at all can be done in the 5 days that follow, and on day 55 the name is open to anyone. There is exactly one way never to enter this chain: keep auto-renewal on.
Domain Is Available (Available)
A .menu address at this stage has not been taken yet, and it goes to whoever registers first. Check the name you have in mind — if it is free, it can be yours within minutes.
Domain Is Active (Active Period)
Once registration is complete, the domain is registered to you for the term you selected. You can renew at any point before it expires to keep it active, or switch on auto-renewal so you never have to watch the date.
Renewal Window (Client Hold)
On its expiry date your .menu domain is put on Client Hold: the site and e-mail go down that day, but the registration is still yours. A single renewal within these first 20 days brings everything back exactly as it was — nothing is lost. The only difference is that a $9.08 late renewal fee is now added to the renewal price; renewing before the expiry date avoids that fee entirely.
Redemption Period (Redemption / RGP)
On day 20 the registration is deleted and the 30-day redemption period that ICANN requires of every gTLD registry begins. The name is not released to anyone during this time; only you can take it back, by paying the restore fee, until day 50. That fee is far higher than a renewal — renewing on time is always the cheaper route.
Pending Delete (Pending Delete)
Once the redemption window closes too, the domain enters its final 5 days and there is no way back. Neither renewal nor restore works here; nobody — your registrar included — can return the name to you. The registry uses this window as the last hold before the name goes back into the pool.
Open to Anyone Again (Released)
On day 55 the name .menu returns to the pool and anyone can register it. Sought-after names are often gone within seconds, and there is no guaranteed way to get one back. Yet staying out of this timeline is entirely in your hands: leave auto-renewal on and the expiry date will never catch you off guard.
The timeline above is the schedule Atak Domain applies and publishes. The ICANN chart you will find elsewhere shows a renewal window of up to 45 days after expiry; ICANN's policy on expired registrations (section 2.2.1) lets registrars delete an expired domain at any time, provided they disclose their policy in advance. We apply that window as 20 days and publish it here in plain sight. Full text of the policy: ICANN Expired Registration Recovery Policy
.menu Domain Specifications and Registration Rules
Registration conditions, supported features and the registry's own timelines in a single table.
.menu Domain Registration
- Document Requirement No documents are required to register a .menu domain
- Character Length 3 - 63 characters
- Registration Period 1 - 10 years
- Name Server Count 2 - 10 servers
.menu Domain Support
- IDN Support No
- Transfer Support Yes
- Late Renewal Support Yes
Frequently Asked Questions About .menu Domains
The questions people actually ask before registering — answered plainly.
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No. The registry publishes no eligibility policy; the documents it does publish cover acceptable use and takedown, reserved and restricted names, sunrise and dispute resolution. No licence, business registration or kitchen certificate is requested at any stage. Legal obligations arise from what you do, not from the domain you hold. Check a name on the .menu search page.
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Usually not — it multiplies work without adding much. One name with locations in subfolders keeps renewal tracking and certificate management simple. Where branches genuinely run different menus and prices, a city name as a subdomain covers it. If you want to test several candidates in one go, the bulk domain search screen does that quickly.
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Yes, and it is one of the most common setups. Point the name at the menu page of your main site from your registrar panel, then print that short address under the QR code and on signage. If the redirect is permanent, use a 301 so search engines associate the right page. The destination should be served over HTTPS; certificate options are on the SSL certificate page.
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Labels are built from Latin letters, digits and hyphens, and a name may not start or end with a hyphen. In practice the binding limit is legibility rather than syntax: if the venue name will be read off a window or under a QR code, avoid hyphens and number substitutions. Where a name has accented spelling, register the plain form your guests would actually type.
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The extension follows standard gTLD transfer rules. Take the authorisation code from your current provider, lift the transfer lock and start the request at the new one. In hospitality the name often sits in the account of the agency that built the menu or of a former employee, so establish who the listed registrant is before you begin. Start at the domain transfer page.
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A menu page is a small site whose traffic arrives in bursts: at lunch and dinner service, hundreds of people may scan the same QR code within minutes. Caching and image sizes therefore matter far more than raw server capacity. Publishing the menu as a real page rather than a PDF also improves mobile legibility and search visibility. Compare options on the hosting page.
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