A website for a restaurant worth the drive
Someone deciding where to eat tonight opens your website on a phone, looking for four things: whether you’re open today, what you cook, what it costs and how to book. A PDF menu that won’t load or a slideshow of plates answers none of them.
Forest is for the restaurant people make a trip for — in the country, by a lake, in a village an hour out of town. The page is a whole day in one real-time 3D take, from first light to night, and over each moment go your words: the produce coming in, the kitchen, the terrace, the dining room.
It ends on the booking card, with your price per head, your days and hours, and a button to your reservations system, which goes on handling tables and covers.
What your site shows
Your name in the early light
At the top of the page, a valley in the early light. Over it: the restaurant’s name, your headline and a sentence on what you cook and where. That sentence is also the one Google may show under your name.
What comes through the door
We drop through the trees to the path in. Make it the hour of the produce: bread out of the oven, what arrives from the kitchen garden or the farm up the road, who’s there to take it in at eight.
The kitchen and the dining room
The path gives onto a clearing with a timber cabin — the kit’s building, which doesn’t change for yours. The words are yours: how many tables, what’s cooked in view, the dish that never leaves the menu.
The terrace in the last light
We round the cabin to the shore, and everything turns amber. There’s room here for the terrace, an aperitif, the set lunch or whatever you serve between services.
Evening service
After dark, the camera looks back across the water at windows full of light. Tell the dinner — when the kitchen opens, the tasting menu, the long unhurried end of the meal, the last plate out.
Book a table
The card appears over the night with a title you choose, your price per head and, beneath it, your days and hours. The button opens your booking page; what doesn’t apply to a restaurant, like length of stay, stays blank and isn’t shown.
Have this ready
- The restaurant’s name and a short line that sums it up: it runs above the headline and forms part of the page’s title.
- What you cook and where you are, in a sentence or two.
- Your opening days and times, the day you close and your phone number, for the booking line.
- Your day in four moments, from the produce to the last service — each needs a time, a title and a short text.
- The price per head you want to show: set lunch, tasting menu or a typical à la carte spend.
- Your reservations link: OpenTable, TheFork, ResDiary or whatever you use.
- The link to your full menu, if it lives elsewhere, to add in the footer.
- Legal name, tax number, address and email for the legal notice.
Worth knowing
Hours and phone number, in writing
Someone checking from the car wants to know whether you’re open today. Write your days, hours and closing day just below the booking title, and add a phone number for people who’d rather ring. Nobody should need another page to find out.
Dishes by name, as text
Name the dishes that define you in the moments of the day — the Sunday roast, the lamb from the farm next door — as text, not a photo of the menu. It reads well on any phone, and Google can read it too.
The full menu, one tap away
The site has no menu section. If yours lives at another address — a page, a PDF — link it from the footer, which takes up to six links named as you like. Check first that it reads properly on a phone.
Google Maps is a separate listing
The card people see on Google Maps is your Google Business Profile, not your website. Once the site is live, add its address to that profile, and check that the hours and phone number match in both places.
Questions
- Will the 3D show my restaurant?
- No. Forest brings an atmosphere — woods, a timber cabin, a lake at nightfall — that it shares with every site made from the kit; it isn’t a portrait of your building, and it takes no photos. What’s only yours, the cooking, the dishes and the people, goes in the words.
- Can people book a table through it?
- The button goes to your reservations system — OpenTable, TheFork, whatever you use — or to a Stripe link if you take deposits. The site doesn’t manage tables, sittings or cancellations; your system does, as it does now.
- Nearly everyone finds us on their phone. Does it work there?
- Yes. While you make it, you see it on a phone and on a desktop, before paying. On a phone, each moment’s text sits low on the screen with the scene behind it, and the booking card closes the flight.
- What if the menu changes or we close for the holidays?
- Go back into the wizard — your answers are kept in that browser — change whatever needs changing, a dish, the hours, “closed until 15 January”, and download the site again. You publish it by dragging the folder into your Cloudflare project.
- Will it be on my own domain?
- Yes. One guide shows you how to buy a domain, for around €10–15 a year, or connect one you already have; another, how to get an email address at it for receiving mail.