Nobody reads your restaurant website. They check three things and leave.
The menu, whether you are open right now, and how to order or book. Every other thing on a restaurant website is decoration, and most of it is what makes the page too slow to answer those three questions before the customer gives up and opens the delivery app instead.
The three questions, answered before the page finishes loading
Get these right and the rest of the site barely matters. Get them wrong and nothing else saves it.
The menu, as text, not as a PDF
A PDF menu is unreadable on a phone, invisible to Google, and invisible to the AI that is increasingly asked "what is good near me". A real HTML menu is searchable, pinch-free, and the only version a language model can actually read back to a customer. This one change is worth more than a redesign.
Open now, or closed, stated plainly
Not a table of hours the customer has to cross-reference against a clock. A live badge that reads your hours and says which you are, computed in your restaurant's timezone rather than in the visitor's, so somebody planning a trip from out of state is told the truth.
One obvious way to order or book
One. Not a row of six delivery logos that makes the customer choose a marketplace and hands over your margin. If ordering can live inside your own site we put it there; if your POS will not allow that, we make the hand-off clean rather than pretending otherwise.
And photographs of your actual food
Stock photography of somebody else's burger is worse than no photograph at all, because regulars can tell. This is the one line item in a restaurant build where we will push you to spend real money.
Your POS decides what is possible, so we check it first
This is where most agencies promise ordering on the site and then quietly deliver a link.
Square
The good case. Square's online ordering embeds straight into a page we build, and its API is self-serve, so the customer orders on your domain, in your design, and you keep the relationship. If you are choosing a POS and you want ordering on your own site, this is the one to choose.
Toast
Toast refuses to be embedded in another site, and its API is gated behind partner approval. So ordering happens on Toast. We build everything up to that moment, keep your menu and hours on your own site where Google and AI can read them, and make the hand-off a single obvious button.
Clover and the rest
Case by case. We check before we promise, which sounds obvious and is not what usually happens. You will be told what is actually possible with the system you already own, including when the answer is that you should change it.
The delivery marketplaces
DoorDash and Uber Eats are discovery, and worth their commission once, for a new customer. They should not own your regulars. The site's job is to be the cheaper second order, which is a retention argument, not a design one.
An AI host, for the calls during service
The one place in hospitality where automation is unambiguously an improvement.
Nobody can answer the phone at seven on a Friday, and that is when people call
The phone rings during service, which is precisely when every pair of hands is busy. An AI host answers every call, reads the hours and the menu, takes a reservation or a pickup order, and never puts anybody on hold to ask the kitchen. It also handles the six calls a night that are just asking whether you are open, which is the question your live badge was already answering on the site.
Work you can go and eat at
A live build, ten minutes from the studio.
King Subs
Sub shop · North Palm Beach, FLA neighbourhood sub shop where the entire brief was the menu, the hours and the order, and the right answer was a deliberately small site that does those three things faster than anything else in town. In the work gallery you can hover the card and see the site it replaced.
Questions from restaurant owners
Can people order food directly from the site?
Yes, and which way depends on your POS. Square's online ordering embeds directly into a page we build, so the customer never leaves your site and you keep your own checkout. Toast blocks being framed, so there the honest answer is a clean hand-off: your menu and your hours on your site, the order on theirs, with the link in one obvious place instead of five. Clover sits in between. We will tell you which of these you are dealing with before promising anything.
Should I keep paying DoorDash and Uber Eats?
Keep them for discovery, stop letting them own your regulars. The marketplace commission is the price of finding a new customer, and it is worth paying once. Paying it again every week for the same person who already knows your name is what quietly removes your margin. The site's job is to be the cheaper second order.
Do I need a separate app?
Almost never. A fast page on a phone does everything an app does for a single-location restaurant, without the build cost, the app store review, or the problem of persuading anybody to install it. We would rather spend that budget on your menu photography.
My hours change and the website is always wrong.
That is the most common complaint in this trade and it is fixable two ways. First, a live open-or-closed badge that reads your real hours and says Open now or Closed, in your restaurant's timezone rather than the visitor's, so somebody in another state planning a trip sees the truth. Second, a password-protected editor so you change the hours yourself in two minutes, including holiday hours, without ringing anyone.
Can you show me a restaurant site you have built?
King Subs in North Palm Beach. A sub shop where the whole job was the menu, the hours and the order, which is genuinely all a good one needs. You can see it in our work gallery next to the site it replaced.
Send me your site and tell me which POS you run
I will tell you in ten minutes whether ordering can live on your own site, whether Google and ChatGPT can read your menu at all, and what your PDF menu is costing you. Coffee is on me, and I will come to you.