Sign up for Cantrip's Restaurant starter kit and it asks for four things: your restaurant's name, the type of cuisine you serve, your location, and your contact info. In exchange you get four pages: Home, Menu, About, Contact. It looks like a real restaurant site the second it loads, food photos and all.
What you don't see on that first look is that the kit also builds two content collections behind the scenes. One is called Reviews. The other is called Menu Items, and it comes with a price field switched on from the start, ready for real prices. That second one is the part worth knowing about before you launch.
The Reviews collection gets used right away. Four sample testimonials go in under fake names (Sarah M., James K., Maria L., David R., every one of them five stars, because starter kit reviewers are an easy crowd), and the homepage's testimonials section is already wired to pull from that exact collection. Your site goes live already showing praise.
The Menu Items collection gets none of that. No sample dishes get added, not even placeholders. And nothing on the site, not the Menu page, not anywhere else, is set up to display it. Click over to the page literally called Menu and here's what you find: a banner image, a paragraph about your food, two more food photos, and a button that says Make a Reservation. No dishes. No prices. The collection built specifically to hold your prices sits empty, with nothing pointing at it.
Compare that to Cantrip's Shop starter kit, which solves the almost identical problem the way you'd expect. It builds a Products collection with pricing, seeds it with six real sample products, gives each one its own page, gives the whole collection a listing page, and drops a "Featured Products" block on the homepage that pulls straight from it. Three separate, working connections between the collection and the site a visitor sees. The Restaurant kit has zero.
This isn't really a bug. It's a starter kit that got most of the way finished and left one piece for you to wire up yourself, without telling you it needs wiring. If you're building a restaurant site on Cantrip, open your Menu Items area in the dashboard before you announce you're live, and check whether a single item shows up anywhere on the pages themselves. For most people who picked this kit, the answer right now is no.
Fixing it takes one of two paths. Add your dishes to the Menu Items collection (the price field is already there, no setup needed) and drop a Collection Teaser section on your Menu page pointed at that collection; now your menu is a real, editable list that updates the moment you add a new dish. Or skip the collection entirely and use a Services section instead, the same one the Salon starter kit uses for its price list, and type your menu straight into it by hand. More typing up front, but no separate collection to remember to link.
The reservation form Cantrip built for you is genuinely good: name, email, phone, party size, preferred date and time, special requests. That's a real reservation request, not a generic contact box with a new coat of paint. The menu is just the one page that quietly needs your attention before anyone else sees it.