People put that stuff up on Google maps, Facebook, and Instagram now.

I know it’s not popular with the crowd here, but those platforms are free, easy to use, and where the customers are. The mainstream options for a website like squarespace are absurdly expensive.

Menus change ie seasonal, and there is a daily changing handwritten chalkboard: Make a photo, put it on IG. Hours change: This week only opened from 8 instead 7: Post it on IG. Who has the time to answer a phonecall? And who uses phone numbers these days anyway? Text me on whatsapp like everyone else does. Disclaimer: Don‘t use IG. But if I want to know if our favourite pizza place is open (cook travels to football games a lot), I ask my wife to check on Insta.

Most people should put in a Google maps entry

The issue is priorities.

If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put building a website in the top 10?

I directionally agree with this but, what do you do in three months when you change to the summer menu?

But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.

It's those things but more as questions than things they want to read. What people actually care about for a restaurant is:

"Can you tell me if the food is good?"

"Can you tell me are the staff great?"

"Can you tell me what does it cost?"

and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.

People want answers that they can trust for those things. They want a trusted source to tell them the answers.

You can't really get any of those things from a Google search or a website (ignoring reviews because they're gamed to hell now). The majority of a restaurant's customers come from word-of-mouth recommendations or reputation through curated services like critics and directories especially at the top end. A good website helps for people who are visiting the area, or for restaurants that are very new and whose owners don't have a great network (or who wrongly believe a website is key to getting business), but for most restaurants the only way to drive business is to build a loyal base of people who tell their friends and colleagues about it.

If a restaurant is going to have a website at all it should be a great one, because bad websites shouldn't be a thing, but a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.