Adoro Bistro
A South Philly classic, brought online.
A family-owned BYOB Italian restaurant with a loyal following and no digital front door. I designed the website, the print menus, and the local search presence that turned word of mouth into a full reservation book.
Great room.
No front door.
For a BYOB, nearly every guest plans the visit in advance. If they can't find you online, they book somewhere else.
Adoro had everything a neighborhood restaurant needs except a digital presence. The kitchen and the room earned loyal regulars through word of mouth, but online there was no site that reflected the quality of the food, no searchable menu, and no verified business profile.
There was also no way to know whether digital was contributing anything to the reservation book. The brief became simple: build the front door, make the menu findable, and make every visit measurable.
A template platform,
pushed past the template.
The site runs on Square Online so the owner can update hours and menus without a developer. I wrote custom HTML and CSS on top of the platform to break the stock layout, so the site reads like the restaurant feels: warm, classic, unfussy.
Custom code over stock blocks
Hand-written HTML and CSS override the template's typography, spacing, and hierarchy where the defaults fell short, without breaking the owner's ability to self-manage content.
Built around two jobs
Every page is structured around what a visitor actually comes to do: read the menu and book a table. Nothing competes with those two paths.
Menus as indexable text
Menu content lives as on-page text rather than a PDF, so dishes are readable on any device and discoverable in search.
The menu guests hold
matches the site they booked from.
The engagement grew into the full guest-facing identity. I designed the physical lunch and dinner menus around Adoro's deep navy and chartreuse palette, with a classic serif treatment that carries from print to screen.
Lunch and dinner menus, 8.5 x 11, designed for print and mirrored on the site.
Findable where guests actually look.
A restaurant site only works if people reach it. I set up and verified the Google Business Profile and handled on-page SEO so branded searches resolve to accurate hours, current menus, and a direct path to reserve.
Google Business Profile set up and verified
On-page SEO with indexable menu content
Accurate hours, location, and reservation path in search results
month-over-month increase in confirmed reservations following the redesign.
Traffic figures reported by Square Online analytics. Reservation growth tracked against the pre-redesign monthly baseline in the restaurant's booking log.
Good restaurant design isn't a website. It's the whole path from search result to table, and every step should feel like the same place.