What Story Highlights Your Restaurant Actually Needs

Open your own profile on your phone and look at the row under your bio. If you are like most of the restaurants we take over, you have eleven highlights, four of them are called "Story," two are the same Ramadan hours from a year that already ended, and one is a repost of a customer who tagged you once in 2023. Nobody has opened any of them in months, including you.

Restaurant Instagram highlights are not a decoration. They are the only part of your profile a stranger can tap to get an answer without DMing you. Somebody saw a Reel, liked the look of the food, and came to your page to find out three things: what you sell, where you are, and whether they can order it for twenty people. If your highlights answer those, your DMs get quieter and your phone rings for the right reasons.

Five highlights cover almost everything people ask

You do not need a highlight for every occasion. You need a short row that answers the questions you get at the counter all day.

Menu. Clear photos of the actual menu pages, or a set of story cards with sections broken up. Not one squished photo of a laminated sheet shot at an angle. If people have to pinch and zoom, they leave. Shoot the menu flat, in good light, one section per story frame.

Hours and location. Your hours in plain text, your cross streets, what the building looks like from the road, and where to park. The storefront photo matters more than people think. Half of finding a place in Dearborn is recognizing the sign from the car.

Catering and large orders. What you cater, the minimum, how much notice you need, and who to contact. This is the highlight that turns into actual money. Most restaurants bury it or skip it entirely.

The room. Four or five frames of the dining room, the counter, the patio if you have one. People want to know if it is a sit-down place or a grab-and-go counter before they bring their family. If you have a back room for parties, that goes here.

Specials or new items. One highlight where new things live. When something comes off the menu, the story comes out of the highlight. This is the only one that needs regular attention.

If you also deliver through an app, or you take pickup orders by phone only, make that its own frame inside Hours rather than a sixth highlight. Fewer, fuller highlights beat a long row of thin ones.

Only the first few are visible without swiping

On most phones, you see about four highlight covers before you have to scroll sideways. Almost nobody scrolls. So the order is not cosmetic.

Put Menu first. Then Hours and Location. Then Catering. Then whatever is most relevant right now — a seasonal item, a new location, a holiday schedule.

Instagram orders highlights by the most recent story added to them, so if you add a frame to an old highlight it jumps to the front. That is how a highlight called "Thank you 🙏" ends up in position one. Use it on purpose: add a frame to Menu and Menu moves left.

Covers should be readable at the size of a thumbnail

You do not need custom icons from a template shop. You need somebody to know what is inside before they tap.

Plain text on a solid color works. Your brand color, the word MENU in a bold font, done. If you want photos as covers, pick one with a clear subject and no text on it — the cover crops to a small circle and anything fussy turns into mush.

What kills a highlight row is mixing styles. Three photo covers, two beige icons, and one accidental screenshot of a story with a face half cropped out. Pick one approach and apply it to all of them. It takes twenty minutes once.

The real problem with highlights is that they go stale

A highlight is permanent in a way a story is not. That cuts both ways. The hours you posted before you started closing Mondays are still up there, and someone is reading them right now and driving over.

Here is the short list of things that quietly go wrong:

• Old holiday hours that are still the top frame of your Hours highlight.
• A menu photo with last year's prices.
• A dish in your Specials highlight that you stopped making.
• A phone number from before you changed carriers.
• A highlight pointing people to an account you no longer run.

Set a reminder for the first of every month. Open each highlight, swipe through, delete anything that is no longer true. It takes five minutes. When we run an account, this is on the schedule alongside posting, because it is exactly the kind of thing that never happens when it belongs to nobody.

You do not need the original stories to build these

People put this off because they think they need to shoot new stories for each one. You do not. Post a photo you already have to your story, then tap Highlight and either add it to an existing one or make a new one. The photo does not have to be new and nobody sees the posting date on the frame.

So you can build all five highlights tonight from photos already on your phone. Menu pages, a storefront shot, the dining room, a tray of catering from a job you did last month. Twenty minutes of work that sits on your profile and answers questions for the next year.

One thing to check before you start: if your account is a personal profile rather than a business or creator account, some of this behaves differently. Switch to a business account first. It is free and it takes a minute in Settings.

When it is worth paying someone to handle it

Highlights are a one-time build and a five-minute monthly check. That is genuinely something you can do yourself, and you should, if you have the twenty minutes.

Where it stops being a DIY job is when it is one item on a list of forty. The posting schedule, the Reels, the DMs, the location tag, the ad that needs new creative, the menu photos that are two years old. Our clients hand us the whole thing — we shoot it, write it, post it on a fixed schedule, and track it on our dashboard — and their only jobs are one call at the start and sending a few references. If nobody at the restaurant wants to be on camera, we bring models to front the brand instead.

If you want us to look at your profile and tell you what is missing before you commit to anything, book a call and we will go through it with you, or call (313) 633-5714 and ask.