Restaurants, pubs & cafes

Websites for independent kitchens, pubs and cafes.

Someone is standing outside at seven on a Friday deciding where to eat. They want the menu, tonight’s opening hours, and a table. If your menu is a PDF that opens sideways, they are going to the place next door.

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From £400 • No VAT to add • 2–8 weeks • Yours once paid & live

The actual problem

Three things, and everything else is decoration.

Hospitality websites get overbuilt constantly. Full-screen video, a story about the founder’s grandmother, a parallax scroll through the dining room. Meanwhile the three things every single visitor came for are hard to find.

They want the menu. They want to know if you are open. They want to book a table. Ninety percent of visits end at one of those three, usually on a phone, often while walking.

The PDF menu is the worst offender in the trade. It opens at the wrong zoom, it cannot be read one-handed, Google cannot index a word of it, and updating it means finding whoever has the original file. A menu built as a proper page fixes all four problems at once.

What goes on a hospitality site

The three things, done properly.

Get the fundamentals right and there is room for the atmosphere afterwards. Do it the other way round and the site looks lovely and books nobody.

Menus as real pages

Readable on a phone without pinching, indexed by Google so dish searches can find you, and editable by you when the specials change. Never a PDF.

Opening hours that are correct

Including bank holidays and the days you close. Wrong hours are the fastest way to lose a customer permanently, and it happens through Google as much as through the site.

Booking without friction

Whether you use OpenTable, ResDiary, a simple form or the phone, it needs to be two taps from any page. We work with whatever you already have rather than forcing a switch.

Google Business Profile set up

For a restaurant this often matters more than the website itself. Hours, photos, menu link and review responses all handled properly, because that panel is what most people actually see.

Allergen information

Handled clearly and kept current, including the pre-packed for direct sale rules. It is a legal obligation and a genuine reassurance for anyone booking for a group.

Photography that sells the room

Real photos of your food and your space, sized to load fast. Stock imagery of someone else’s pasta is obvious to everyone and actively costs you bookings.

Book a Free Consultation

See it built

Ember & Oak Kitchen.

We built a full concept site for an open-fire restaurant in Sheffield, partly to work out how a menu should behave on a phone when someone is standing outside in the cold deciding whether to come in.

It is a demo rather than a client, so you can pick it apart without anyone’s real business on the line. The menu structure, booking route and hours handling are the parts worth looking at.

Open the Ember & Oak demo →

There are three other industry demos alongside it on the examples page.

The Ember and Oak demo restaurant site — Ember & Oak, our restaurant demo

20+

Sites built by our team

2–8wks

Typical Turnaround

100%

UK Based

VAT Added

Restaurant margins do not leave room for a five thousand pound website, and they should not have to. The starting price here is the same as every other trade we work with.

From £400, fixed before we start.
No VAT to add, because we are not VAT registered.
Usually 2 to 8 weeks, and we can work around a quiet period.
Once it’s paid in full and live, the site, the domain and the photography rights we hand over are yours.
Menu updates included in a Plus plan if you would rather not do them yourself.

Full price list and the quote calculator →

Common questions

What owners usually ask

Four reasons, and they compound. It opens at the wrong zoom on a phone, so it cannot be read one-handed. Google cannot index the dish names, so nobody finds you searching for what you serve. Updating it means tracking down the original file. And screen readers cannot handle most restaurant PDFs at all. A menu built as a normal page solves all four.

Yes. If you already use OpenTable, ResDiary, Collins or anything similar, we integrate it rather than push you onto something new. Switching booking systems mid-project is disruptive for your staff and rarely worth it. If you take bookings by phone, we make the number a one-tap button instead.

For a lot of independents, honestly yes. Most people searching for somewhere to eat never reach your site. They read the panel: hours, photos, reviews, menu link. We set that up properly as part of the build, because a perfect website behind a neglected profile still loses the booking.

Yes, that is the point of building it as pages rather than a PDF. Changing a price, adding a special or pulling a dish takes a minute from a phone or laptop. We show you at handover. If you would rather hand it over, menu updates are covered by our Plus plans.

They help more in hospitality than almost any other trade, because people are buying an experience they cannot see yet. That said, good phone photos in daylight beat bad professional ones, and beat stock imagery every time. Customers spot stock food photography instantly and it costs you trust. We will tell you honestly whether what you have is good enough.

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