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, in a village an hour out of town, by the sea or up in the hills. The page is a whole day told in six of your photos, from the front in the morning to the dining room lit up at night; each photo gains depth, and the camera moves into it as the page scrolls. 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
The front, in the early light
The page starts with your restaurant seen from outside, ideally in the morning before you open. Over the photo: 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
First moment: a photo of the morning’s produce, or the pass with bread fresh out of the oven. Make it the hour of the produce — what arrives from the kitchen garden or the farm up the road, who’s there to take it in at eight.
The dining room before service
The photo of the room with the tables laid, taken from a corner so the far end shows. The words are yours: how many tables, what’s cooked in view, the dish that never leaves the menu.
The terrace in the afternoon
Third photo: the terrace or garden mid-afternoon, parasols up. There’s room here for an aperitif, the set lunch or whatever you serve between services.
Evening service
The fourth moment is dinner: the room with the candles lit, or the terrace in the last of the light. Tell it — 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 your last photo, the restaurant lit up at 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
- Six photos, all required: the front, the produce or the kitchen, the dining room laid, the terrace in the afternoon, dinner, and the restaurant lit up at night — each at least 1,600 px along its longest side.
- 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, for the footer; and 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 or need to mention an allergy. Nobody should need another page to find out.
The whole room, not just a plate
A close-up of a dish has nothing far away, so it gains almost no depth. A laid table in the foreground with the room behind it, or the bar with the kitchen beyond, shows far more in 3D. Name the dishes that define you in the text instead: it reads on any phone, and Google reads 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 in the footer — it holds up to six links, each under the name you give it. 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 it show my restaurant, and on a phone?
- It shows the one in your photos — the front, the dining room, the terrace — each with its own depth and the camera easing into it; it isn’t a virtual tour or a 3D model of the building. On a phone, each moment’s text sits low on the screen with the photo behind it, and a browser that can’t draw the 3D shows your photos still, one per screen, with every word and the button.
- 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.
- Are my photos uploaded while I make the site?
- No: the wizard prepares them in your own browser — capping them at 2,048 px and dropping their location as it saves them again — and works out their depth there too. The first photo brings down the model that does it, about 46 MB from promti.app, a single time. On a recent computer the 3D for all six is done in seconds; without WebGPU, in about 4–5 seconds a photo.
- All I have are photos of dishes. What now?
- You need six photos of the place, not the menu, and the 3D doesn’t change what’s in them. A phone will do if you pick the hour: the front in the morning, the room laid in daylight, the restaurant lit at dusk.
- What if the menu changes, the terrace opens or we close for the holidays?
- Go back into the wizard — your answers and photos are kept in that browser — change whatever needs changing, a photo, a dish, the hours, “closed until 15 January”, and download the site again without paying twice. You publish it by dragging the folder into your Cloudflare project.