Design database to allow for time based food menus

Question

I'm trying to build a system that allows restaurants to create menus that can show based on time of day and day of week.

For example, there may be a standard menu, a happy hour menu, a specials menu, etc that all have their own items per menu and pricing per item. A cheese pizza could be $10 on Friday 10AM-2PM and $5.00 3PM - 5PM.

What's a good way to design the database so items can have various pricing (based on time of day and day of week) as well as be associated to various 'menus' (in order to categorize them)?

I currently have a system that doesn't really allow for this (since time-based menus weren't needed at the time).

*Would I need a menu_items_times table with a column for price, time start, time end?*

venues table - each individual restraunt (primary_menu_id) relates to a menu_id from menus table

    +------------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
    | Field            | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
    +------------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
    | venue_id         | bigint(20)   | NO   | PRI | None    | auto_increment |
    | name             | varchar(256) | NO   |     | None    |                |
    | primary_menu_id  | bigint(20)   | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
    +------------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

menus table each menu and what venue it belongs to

    +----------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
    | Field    | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
    +----------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
    | menu_id  | bigint(20)   | NO   | PRI | None    | auto_increment |
    | venue_id | bigint(20)   | NO   |     | None    |  
    | name     | varchar(256) | NO   |     | None    |                |
    +----------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

menu_items table each individual menu item for a menu and what category (ie. 'drinks', 'food', 'specials' category) and 'category_index' for sorting the categories.

    +---------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
    | Field         | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
    +---------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
    | menu_item_id  | bigint(20)   | NO   | PRI | none    | auto_increment |
    | menu_id       | bigint(20)   | NO   |     | none    |                |
    | name          | varchar(256) | NO   |     | none    |                |
    | price         | float        | NO   |     | none    |                |
    | category      | varchar(64)  | NO   |     | none    |                |
    | category_index| int(11)      | NO   |     | none    |                |
    +---------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

menu_items_categories view

    +----------------+--------------+-----------+-------------+------+---------+
    | Field          | Type         | Collation |  Attributes | NULL | Extra   |
    +----------------+--------------+-----------+-------------+------+---------+
    | menu_id        | bigint(20)   |           |             | No   |         |
    | category       | varchar(64)  |           |             | No   |         |
    | category_index | int(11)      |           |             | No   |         |
    +----------------+--------------+-----------+-------------+------+---------+

Answer 1

I can see 4 ways of doing this...

1. Add a time_id field to menu_items , that contains the id of a static array that contains times ... 1=>morning, 2=>evening, 3=>all-day, etc.

2. Same as #1, but make the field a VARCHAR that can be search in a LIKE (%%) query ... so time_id becomes something like ".8.9.10.11." for 8-11am, '.18.19.20.21." for 6-9pm ... a bit more messy, and LIKE queries are a little more intensive so probably not ideal.

3. Instead of a field in menu_items , add another table ... menu_times ... that contains menu_item_id and time_id s ... this may be faster than #2. It could even contain a time_description instead of time_id , such as "all morning" or "happy hour".

4. You could put menu_times between menus and menu_items ... so menus contained menu_times , which contained menu_items .

One thing to note about all of these solutions is that some of them require multiple menu_items for different prices ... which is not ideal. With solutions 1-3, however, you could solve this by moving the price into the menu_times table.