Restaurant Website Design: Menus, Reservations, Online Orders

Here is a restaurant website we designed and built: Old City Cafe & Grill in Cranford, New Jersey.

oldcitycafeandgrill.com

oldcitycafeandgrill.com/reservations

oldcitycafeandgrill.com/food-menu

oldcitycafeandgrill.com/catering

A guest lands on your site with one of a few questions. The site’s job is to answer it immediately.

• The menu as real text. Not a PDF, not a photo of the printed menu. Text loads fast, reads well on a phone, and can be found by Google when someone searches for a dish.
• Hours and location at the top. Including holiday hours, with a map and a tap-to-call number.
• Reservations. A way to book a table on your own site, without sending the guest somewhere else to do it.
• An ordering link. One clear button to the ordering system you prefer.
• A catering and private events form. Date, headcount, and budget collected up front, so you can answer with a real quote.
• Your own photos. The food and the room as they actually are.
• Speed on a phone. Most guests are on one, and many are deciding where to eat right now.

Why not a PDF menu?

A PDF menu is a common problem on restaurant websites, and an easy one to fix. On a phone it downloads slowly, opens in a separate viewer, and has to be pinched and dragged to read. Google can’t reliably match its dishes to a search. And when a price changes, someone has to remake the file, so it often goes out of date.

A menu built into the page as text loads instantly, reads cleanly at any screen size, and lets a search for a specific dish lead to you.

What guests should never have to do

Hunt for the hours. Call to ask whether you take reservations. Scroll past a full-screen video to find the menu. Fill in a contact form to ask about catering and wonder if anyone read it. Each of those is a guest who may choose somewhere easier.

Old City is a family-run Lebanese restaurant in downtown Cranford. Their new site went live in October 2026 on the domain they already had, with their old page addresses kept so existing links and search results still work.

What we built:

• A new mobile-friendly website with their real food and drink menus, with prices
• Online table reservations
• Catering and private-party request forms
• Notifications to the owner’s phone for every reservation and request

Read the Old City Cafe & Grill case study for the details.

A form is only useful if someone sees what it collected.

On the sites we build, a reservation or a catering request doesn’t sit in an inbox nobody checks. It goes to the owner or manager as a notification the moment it’s submitted, with every detail the guest entered. For Old City, catering requests also trigger a text message through an approved business texting line.

For online ordering, we link to the system you already use or prefer. We’ll connect it and make it easy to find. The choice of ordering provider stays yours.

A restaurant site built this way gives Google what it needs: a readable menu, your hours and address in a format search engines understand, and a separate page for things people search for, like catering and private events.

The site is the foundation. Keeping your Google listing active and your reviews answered is the ongoing part, which we cover under restaurant SEO.

Website prices depend on the project, so we quote each one after a short call. For a restaurant, the price mostly comes down to how many pages and menus there are, whether you need reservations, ordering, and catering forms connected, and whether you already have good photos.

You get a written quote that lists exactly what is included. More on how we scope projects is on our web design services page.