Restaurant Photography in Los Angeles: A Practical Guide for Delivery Apps, Menus and Google

Use the Los Angeles sun instead of buying lights

Los Angeles sits at about 34 degrees north, and the difference between summer and winter light is large enough to change how you plan a shoot. Around the June solstice the city gets roughly 14 hours 16 minutes of daylight and the noon sun stands about 79 degrees above the horizon, almost overhead. Around the December solstice that drops to about 9 hours 44 minutes and the noon sun is only about 33 degrees high, so light comes in low and far across the room.

The practical consequence: in summer, a north or south window gets strong indirect light for most of the working day, and direct sun is harsh and short. In winter, low sun pushes deep into the dining room and can hit tables it never reaches in June, which is good for mood but bad for glare on plates and glossy sauces. Walk your room at 10 a.m., noon and 3 p.m. in both seasons before you decide where the photo table goes.

• June: shoot between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. at a window that never receives direct sun, and use a white wall or poster board opposite the window as a fill card.
• June midday: avoid tables where the overhead sun creates hard shadows under plates; move 1 to 2 meters back from the glass.
• December: direct low sun enters deep into the room, so shoot earlier (9 to 11 a.m.) or later (2 to 4 p.m.) on a west-facing window, or diffuse with a sheer curtain.
• Year-round: place the dish 30 to 60 cm from the window, camera at roughly 45 degrees above the plate for a natural menu angle, and 90 degrees overhead for flat-lay social shots.

Shoot for the platform, not for the portfolio

Delivery apps crop and compress images, so a beautiful wide shot of the whole table often turns into an unreadable thumbnail. Shoot each dish as its own frame, fill most of the frame with the food, and keep the plate edges inside a square crop so the app can resize without cutting the dish. A 1:1 square and a 16:9 landscape version of the same plate cover almost every placement you will need.

This site publishes delivery photo spec pages for Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub and BentoBox, each with a United States version. Use them to check recommended dimensions and file handling before a shoot day, and always confirm against the upload screen in your merchant portal, because platforms change requirements without much notice.

• Keep the dish centered with a small margin on all sides so a square crop still shows the whole plate.
• Shoot a plain background (wood, slate, linen, or a clean counter) rather than a cluttered table.
• Take one overhead, one 45-degree and one close detail of the key ingredient per dish.
• Photograph the item exactly as it is served, including sides and garnish, because the photo has to match what the customer receives.

Menu law: the photo has to match the calories

In the United States, restaurant chains with 20 or more locations must show calorie counts for standard menu items, and FDA guidance covers online menus as well as menu boards. That rule reaches your photography directly: if a calorie figure is attached to an item, the photo must show that item, with the same components and portion, not a stylized version with extra fries or a swapped side.

For independent Los Angeles restaurants the federal chain rule may not apply, but the habit is still worth keeping. California diners are used to seeing nutrition information, and a photo that overstates the portion creates complaints and refund requests on delivery orders. If you list calories anywhere, photograph the exact build you serve and update the photo when the recipe changes.

Spanish and English menus, one photo set

Los Angeles menus commonly appear in English and Spanish, and often in both on the same page. Shoot once, then use the same image for both language versions so the dish is recognizable whichever menu a guest reads. Keep the dish name short in both languages and let the photo carry the description.

For print, export at a higher resolution than the delivery apps need, because a photo that looks sharp on a phone can look soft on a laminated menu. For a QR menu, the opposite applies: compress for fast loading on a phone held at arm's length in a dim dining room. Test the QR menu on a phone in the actual dining room light before you print table cards.

Google Business Profile and social need different crops

Google Business Profile favors recent, real photos of the food, the interior and the exterior, and guests use them to decide whether to walk in. Upload a mix: signature dishes, the room at service time, the entrance so people can find the door. Replace seasonal or outdated photos rather than letting old ones pile up.

For Instagram, shoot vertical 4:5 or 9:16 for feed and Stories, and keep the dish in the upper two thirds so on-screen text does not cover it. For the website hero, a 16:9 landscape with empty space on one side gives your designer room for a headline. One shoot day can produce all of these if you plan the crops before you start.

A workable monthly photo routine

Most restaurants do not need a photographer every week. They need a repeatable routine: one dish or one corner of the room per week, shot in the same window light at the same time, so the library stays current without a production day. When a dish changes, the photo changes with it.

FoodPhoto takes a real photo of your own dish and improves the light, background and crop for menus, delivery apps and social while keeping the food as it is, and every photo arrives as a kit of sizes for the hero image, delivery apps, Instagram and Google Business Profile. It does not create a different dish and cannot guarantee approval by any platform, so keep the original files and check each app's upload screen yourself.