Restaurants · Website design
Hours, menu, table. Everything else is decoration until those work.
Nearly everyone who opens a restaurant website is standing somewhere, on a phone, deciding whether to come to you tonight. A menu locked in a PDF, an autoplaying video and last winter's hours will lose that person before the page finishes loading.
What this trade actually needs
Four things that decide whether they come in.
A restaurant site is not a brochure. It is a utility that has to answer three questions in under ten seconds, and only then is it allowed to be beautiful — which, for the right room, it absolutely should be.
- 01
The menu is text, never a PDF
A PDF or a photographed menu cannot be read aloud by a phone, cannot be searched, pinches badly on a small screen, and is close to invisible to search engines. Your menu is the most-read page you have. It gets built as real text, priced from what you actually charge, and it stays editable without calling me.
- 02
Hours have to be right in three places at once
The site, your Google listing, and the sign on the door. When they disagree, people trust Google and then arrive angry. I mark the hours up so search engines read them properly, and I will tell you plainly that your Google Business Profile matters more than your homepage — even though I'm the one selling the homepage.
- 03
Reservations belong in your account, not mine
If the site connects to a booking or ordering platform, that account is opened in your name, on your card, with you as the owner. I get access. Restaurants lose years of booking history when the person who set it up disappears, and I am not going to be that person.
- 04
Stock food photography reads as a lie
Everyone can tell. A dish that isn't yours, shot in a studio in another country, tells a diner the room won't look like the pictures either. Either we shoot the actual food and the actual room, or we build a site whose strength is type and words and doesn't pretend to have photographs it hasn't got.
Asked by owners
The questions restaurant owners ask.
Yes, and you should be able to — a menu you have to email someone to update is a menu that goes stale. How that works depends on the build, and it is one of the first things we decide rather than one of the last.
Often no. If the third-party apps already handle your delivery, adding a second ordering system creates two menus to keep in sync and one of them will be wrong by March. I would rather build one page that sends people to the channel you already run well.
It is usually the most valuable thing you own and the most commonly wasted. Longevity is a claim nobody can copy and everybody can verify — but it has to be exact. "Since 1984" with a source behind it is worth more than "a Philadelphia institution", which means nothing and could be written by anyone.
If the room and the plates are the pitch, yes, and it is the best money in the budget. If you would rather not, we design for it — a type-led site with no photography is a legitimate answer and looks far better than a site padded with pictures of someone else's food.
Begin
Start with a question.
Tell me what you cook and what your current site gets wrong. You will get a straight answer on whether the studio is the right fit, in the first reply.
Monday to Friday
An email reaches the same person directly. If you would rather set the brief out in full, with what you need, where to start and how quickly, there is a short form on the studio page, and it goes to the same address.