What should a Hong Kong restaurant post the week before a holiday?

Have a holiday menu ready but no idea what to post? Here is a seven-day plan you can copy.

Start with the service you want to fill. Then share the offer, one dish, the booking deadline and any tables still available. On the day, post a short update if your team has time.

This is a suggested schedule, not a tested case study. If your customers usually book weeks ahead, start earlier.

First, choose the service and get the details ready

Pick the date and sitting you want to fill — Friday dinner, for example. Use your own booking history to decide. Which service sells best is different in every restaurant: for some it is the holiday itself, for others the night before.

Check the date before you plan around it, because the Hong Kong general holiday is not always the night people eat out. The 2026 Mid-Autumn general holiday is Saturday 26 September, gazetted as 「中秋節翌日」, the day following the festival — so the reunion dinner itself falls on Friday 25 September, an ordinary working day. Christmas has the same shape: 25 and 26 December 2026 are general holidays, and Christmas Eve on Thursday 24 December is not. Look up the gazetted dates, then look at what your own booking book did last year.

Before you post, confirm:

• The menu, the price per head and any additional charges.
• Available sittings, the booking deadline and any deposit.
• One booking link or contact method that works.
• Correct opening hours everywhere customers check them — your own site, your Google Business Profile, your OpenRice page.
• Who will answer comments and messages.

Save this posting plan

The timings below are starting points. Move the deadline reminders earlier if your kitchen needs a longer lead time, or if your booking policy closes sooner.

Seven days before: share the offer

One post, on Instagram and Facebook. Use a clear menu photo. Name the set menu, the price per head, the party sizes you can seat, the sittings you have and the date bookings close.

Do not write "DM for details". An Instagram feed caption carries no clickable link, so ask for one short keyword in the comments instead, and say exactly what will arrive.

Caption to adapt:

Planning your [holiday] dinner? Our [menu name] is available on [date] at [price and charges]. We can seat [party sizes] at [times]. Comment MENU and we will send you the menu and booking details.

Only promise a reply if someone will actually send it. Set the keyword automation up in your Meta Business Suite inbox and test it from a colleague's account before this post goes out — the caption on its own sends nothing. Answering manually is fine too.

Five days before: show one dish

A real photo or a short clip of the one dish people will talk about. No price, no pitch. Add one useful detail, such as how many the dish serves, or a dietary option you can genuinely provide. Keep the same keyword in the last line, for everyone who scrolled past the offer.

Coming with friends? Our [dish] serves [number] and is part of the [holiday] menu. Comment MENU for the full menu and booking details.

Three days before: explain the deadline

Use your actual cut-off. Catering (到會) needs a longer lead time than a table, so if the two deadlines differ, write both.

Catering orders close at [time, date]. Table bookings close at [time, date]. [Deposit details.] Comment MENU for the details.

One day before: update availability

Check the booking record before you post. If you are full, say so — a "fully booked" post is not a wasted post — and offer another date only if it is genuinely available. If seats remain, name the number and the sitting: "8 seats left at 6:30pm" beats "book now".

Booking update, [time, date]: we have [availability] at [times]. Message us to check the latest.

On the day: keep it manageable

If staffing allows, post a short Story of the food or the room. Confirm today's hours and what is still free. Keep someone available to answer enquiries — a question left sitting at 4pm is a table lost.

We are open today from [time] to [time]. [Current booking or walk-in information.] Here is what is coming out of the kitchen.

Copy this reply when someone asks for the menu

Hi! Here is our [holiday] menu: [menu link]. It is available on [date] at [price and charges]. To request a table, use [booking link or contact]. Your booking is confirmed once [your actual confirmation process]. Happy to help if you have a question.

Replace every bracket before you use any of these examples.

After the service, check what happened

Record enquiries, confirmed bookings and actual covers. Ask customers how they found you, or use a booking link you can identify. Treat an enquiry as an enquiry until the booking is confirmed.

For the next holiday, keep the posts that worked and fix the ones that left people asking for something you had not told them.

Hong Kong details that change the plan

Lunar New Year and Easter are blocks, not single nights. 團年飯 and 開年飯 book earliest and usually take a deposit. In 2027, Lunar New Year's Day is Saturday 6 February, so 團年飯 falls on Friday 5 February; the third and fourth days, Monday 8 and Tuesday 9 February, are general holidays, the fourth day substituting because the second falls on a Sunday. Easter 2027 runs four days: Good Friday 26 March, the day following on 27 March, and Easter Monday 29 March. Both blocks are worth a dedicated menu, and both need three to four weeks of notice rather than one.

Plan from the gazetted date, not from the month. Lunar New Year's Day fell on 29 January in 2025 and on 17 February in 2026, and restaurant receipts moved with it: total receipts fell 3.2% year on year in January 2026 and rose 5.7% in February. A plan built on "February is a strong month" would have been wrong in one of those two years.

Set special hours on your Google Business Profile. They cover an adjustment or closure of up to six consecutive days, and they only appear if your business hours are already set to "Open with main hours". Do it the same evening you publish the offer.

The automatic reply has limits, so plan around them. Meta's private reply lets you send one message to a commenter, within seven days of the comment. After that you may follow up only if that person replies, and only within 24 hours of their reply. That is enough to send a menu and a booking link, and not enough to hold a conversation — so put the booking link in the first message.

Keep OpenRice in step. Your OpenRice (開飯喇) page is a second shopfront, and you do not control its ranking. The holiday hours and the set-menu price there should match your posts exactly, because a diner who spots a difference books somewhere else.

Post to Facebook as well as Instagram. Advertising reach in Hong Kong is 4.05 million people on Instagram and 4.70 million on Facebook. The person booking a twelve-seat family table is more likely to be on the second one.

What we would skip

We have never run this for a restaurant. WittiGrow has six users and none of them is a restaurant, so we have no covers, no bookings and no before-and-after to show you. This is the plan we would run, built from the holiday calendar and the platform documentation. Read it as that.

We would skip the daily countdown. Seven posts in seven days about one set menu teaches people to scroll past you.

We would skip quoting a conversion rate for comment-to-message. Every confident-looking figure we could trace was published by a company selling message automation, with no method and no sample size. Measure your own comments against your own reach across three holidays instead.

And we would skip paid boosting once the service is full. Reach you cannot seat is money spent to disappoint people.

Before the next holiday, check what happens after the message

A week of posts ends on your own site or your own booking page, and that is the part nobody looks at. Run the free WITTI Grow audit on your URL — no signup, no card — and it will grade the path a customer walks from your profile to a confirmed table.

Next guide: Check your Google Business Profile before paying to boost a post