Paradise Somali Cafe & Restaurant
the Kentish Town restaurant site we designed and built
Paradise serves halal Somali food from 101 Kentish Town Road, a few minutes walk from Camden. The client already had their name and their mark, so our team designed and built a six page site around them, put the whole menu online with a price and a photograph against every dish, and handed over something the owners update without calling us.
See it live at paradisesomali.co.uk
What the client needed
The second half of the brief was the food itself. Somali cooking is unfamiliar to a lot of people walking up Kentish Town Road. Nobody orders kilyo or ful madamas from a name on a board. The site had to explain the menu, not just list it.
The kitchen at Paradise has more than twenty years behind it and the reviews say the rest, with a 4.9 average on Google and regulars who write about the lamb and the sambusa. The name was already on Google and on the delivery apps. What the owners did not have was a place of their own. Somebody who heard about a Somali restaurant in Kentish Town could find a phone number and a couple of photographs and then nothing. No menu to read before setting off, no opening hours without a phone call, no way to see the room before booking a table for eight.
We designed around their identity, we did not replace it
The client came to us with their logo and their colours in place. Plenty of companies would have opened by selling them a rebrand. The mark was working on the shopfront and on the packaging, so our job was to build a site that carried it properly rather than start again.
We took the green from the logo for headings and buttons, pulled a warm terracotta for dish names and prices, and kept everything behind them cream and off white so the food carries the colour on every page. The palm from the mark runs faintly behind the menu sections, which ties the site back to the sign above the door without getting in front of the photography.
For type we set a tall condensed face for headings against a rounded sans for reading text. The headings read like a signboard. The body copy stays comfortable for somebody squinting at a menu on a phone in the street outside.
How our designers worked through it
01
We started with the questions rather than the homepage. Anyone landing on a restaurant site wants one of five things: what the food is, what it costs, where the place is, when it opens, and whether eight people can sit down together. Every page got one of those jobs and stopped there.
03
We split the menu across two pages on purpose. One page sells the food to somebody still deciding where to eat. The other answers somebody who has already decided and wants the price of a half chicken mandi. Trying to do both on one page does neither well.
02
That gave us six pages. Home introduces the restaurant and puts the Google reviews where people see them early. About covers the kitchen and the family who run it. Menu Highlights walks through the dishes with a description and a price for each. Full Menu carries the complete list by category. Dining and Groups explains the second room at the back, which is the page that matters for families and larger tables. Contact holds the address, the opening hours, the map and the route in.
The photography does the explaining
On the About page we ran sixteen of those photographs as a single grid against a deep green background, which gives somebody scrolling a sense of the whole kitchen in one screen. It carries more weight than another paragraph about authenticity.
Words only go so far with food people have not eaten. Every dish on the site sits next to its own photograph, plated the way it arrives at the table rather than styled past recognition. Kilyo, ful madamas, malawax, zigni, the sambusa the restaurant is known for. A visitor can see what lands in front of them before they order.
The full menu online, with prices on the page
Most restaurants in this position photograph a laminated menu, post it to Facebook and leave it there. We built the Full Menu as a catalogue instead, so every dish is its own entry with a photograph, a description and a price, and a visitor can browse by breakfast, chicken dishes, fish, meat, vegetarian, sides, desserts or drinks.
The prices sit in the open. Ful madamas at £7, kilyo at £8, malawax at £1. Nothing hidden behind a form or a phone call. Somebody choosing between two places on Kentish Town Road can compare in ten seconds, which is roughly how long they will give it.
The owners update it without writing code
Menus move. A price goes up, a dish comes off for the summer, a new drink arrives. The owners open the entry in the editor, change it and publish, with no ticket to us and no invoice for a two minute job.
We build every site this way. The difficult part stays with our team. The daily running goes to the owner, with training so the family can use it from the first week.
People should be able to read your menu before they walk in
We design and build websites for restaurants, cafes and takeaways across London, and we hand them over so you can run them yourself. Book a free 30 minute consultation, tell us about the place, and we will show you what your site needs to do.
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