Restaurants · Websites
Websites for restaurants
Your website gets a few seconds to show the room and the food. Then booking should feel obvious. Arête designs restaurant sites around atmosphere, menu, hours and a direct reservation route, so the relationship with the diner stays yours.
From £1,800 per project
The situation
Why your customers are searching.
Plenty of restaurant sites still run on PDF menus, stock photos and a booking button that sends the diner straight to a platform. That can leave you paying per cover while the platform keeps the diner's details and shows them other restaurants. A well-built site flips that. It answers the diner's questions fast and brings the booking home.
What sends them looking
- Per-cover and commission fees from booking platforms are starting to add up.
- Weekends are full. Tuesdays and Wednesdays aren't.
- You've got a new menu, chef, refurb or opening to tell people about, including people who've never been in.
- You're in a tourist area, and visitors can't easily read the menu or book in their own language.
- Private dining, set menus or wine dinners need a steady flow of bookings to pay their way.
The problem
What costs restaurants work.
Where the work slips away
- PDF or photo menus are slow on mobile, hard to read and close to invisible to search engines.
- Photography that doesn't match the room or the plates leaves diners unsure what they're walking into.
- Opening hours, kitchen closing times and holiday closures can disagree between your website, Google and the booking platforms, and diners notice.
- Overseas visitors find you on Google Maps, then leave when the site, menu and booking route are English only.
- Send a diner to a third-party booking page and that platform can market other restaurants to them.
What makes customers hesitate
- The booking platform brings in covers. Pushing diners elsewhere feels like a risk.
- Proper food photography sounds expensive, and hard to fit around service.
- It's hard to see how a new website changes how full the dining room is.
- Past social ads brought likes and comments, and no bookings anyone could see.
How it helps
What a better website changes.
- Text menus that load fast on a phone and change the same day the specials do.
- Original photography of your room and your dishes, so diners know what they're booking.
- Hours, a map and practical details near the top of the page. Nobody has to dig through the footer.
- Direct reservations, WhatsApp or phone booking, set up around how your restaurant runs service.
What you get
Menus as proper web pages
Menus built as web pages with prices, dietary markings and allergen guidance, quick to update when dishes change.
Room and plate photography direction
A shot list and art direction for original photography of dishes, the dining room and service, so the site looks like your restaurant. Because it is.
Multilingual structure with language switcher
Language versions of the key pages (menu, hours and booking) with proper technical markup, so each version can be found in search.
A direct reservation journey
Booking through your own system, a flat-fee tool, or a WhatsApp or phone route, with a confirmation that leaves the diner in no doubt.
Events and private dining pages
Pages for set-menu evenings, wine dinners, seasonal menus and private dining, each with its own enquiry or booking route.
Hours, map and getting-there details
Opening hours, kitchen times, an embedded map and notes on parking or transport, kept in step with your Google Business Profile.
Measurement
The enquiries that count, tracked properly.
What counts as an enquiry
- A table booked direct through your own site or booking system.
- A WhatsApp message or call to book, started from your website or Google Business Profile.
- An enquiry for private dining, a group or an event.
- A seat booked for a set-menu evening, tasting night or seasonal special.
What gets tracked
- Direct reservations from the website, plus bookings started but not finished.
- Mobile menu views, and how many of those visitors go on to book.
- Private dining and event enquiries submitted.
- Bookings by language version, where the site is multilingual.
Worth knowing
What customers check, and the rules to follow.
What customers look for before they call
- Photos of your own dishes and your own dining room, lit the way diners will see them.
- An up-to-date menu with prices, dietary markings and allergen guidance.
- Accurate hours, a map that works and a line on parking or transport.
- Recent Google reviews, with your replies on show.
- A booking route that confirms the table straight away, or says exactly how and when it will be confirmed.
Rules worth knowing
- Information on the 14 regulated allergens must be available, and for food sold online for delivery or collection, it's needed both before purchase and on delivery.
- In England, businesses with 250 or more employees must show calorie information on menus, online menus included. Most independents fall below that threshold.
- Ads featuring alcohol, wine pairings included, must follow the CAP Code's alcohol rules and Meta's age restrictions.
- Online menu prices should match what you charge in the restaurant, with compulsory charges included and any discretionary service charge shown as optional.
Straight answer
Is it right for you?
The right call for independents who want to own more of their bookings. Diners see the room as it is.
Made for
- Independent restaurants that want more of their reservations coming direct.
- Restaurants in tourist areas or cities with many international visitors.
- Restaurants with private dining, events or seasonal menus to promote.
Not for
- Restaurants that are fully booked through a platform and happy with what it costs.
- Group restaurants whose brand website is controlled centrally.
- Restaurants unwilling to arrange any original photography.
Starting price
From £1,800
per project, fixed scope
What moves the price
- Number of pages and page templates
- How much copywriting and photography support is needed
- A content management system or blog
- Booking systems, integrations or multilingual structure
- Custom animation and interaction
Questions
Websites for restaurants: your questions answered
Is there an example of this approach?
Arête's self-initiated ARDI project, a website for an independent Italian restaurant in Tenerife, shows the approach. It's an intimate multilingual site built around the atmosphere of the dining room, the menu and a direct WhatsApp reservation journey, with original photography. It wasn't client work. It illustrates design decisions and makes no claim about commercial results.
Why not just upload the menu as a PDF?
PDFs load slowly on phones and are fiddly to zoom and read. Search engines struggle with them too. A text menu updates in minutes, can be translated and can carry dietary markings. It can also help you show up for searches about specific dishes.
Start a conversation
Tell Arête about the business and what currently feels missing.
You will receive a direct reply with the most sensible next step, even if that means recommending that nothing needs changing yet.
A direct reply
A personal reply, usually within one working day. No sales script, no chasing.
A short conversation
A look at the business, your current website and what a good result would look like for you.
A clear recommendation
The leanest sensible next step, with fixed scope and a fixed price. Sometimes that's nothing yet, and you'll be told so.
Prefer email? Write to info@aretemarketing.co.uk.