Award-winning restaurant websites have two things in common, excellent user-experience and a vibrant appearance. The best restaurant websites have mouth-watering imagery and videos, giving the potential customers the first bite with their eye.
Usability is essential; don’t over-design your website with imagery distracting users from vital information. The idea is to let your potential customers find your locations, know you’re opening times, see what’s on the menu, and most importantly get them to visit.
We searched the web finding a variety of different restaurant ideas, including casual dining, family-style, fine dining, burger joints, to use as design inspiration on your upcoming project.
Table of Contents
Völlerei Restaurant & Bar
Völlerei – is a fine Austrian cuisine restaurant and bar based in Saalfelden, Salzburg, Austria.
The style of this website goes well with the fine dining with the on-point graphic design of the heading hero section. We especially like the minimalist navigation to give more visual space to the hero sections.
However, they still have a visible call to action “make a reservation” in the top right with a phone icon. This helps clear any confusion and lets customers quickly make a reservation with a click of the button.
Site address: Voellerei.at/en
Between the Bread
Between the bread offers catering services and event planning it’s an excellent inspiration on how it’s done correctly. The header has all the relevant information and shrinks when scrolling. The restaurant website design has cool hover effecting changing to eye-catching images.
A few points we would add is a clickable phone number to make it more accessible for users to call the restaurant; this is a great addition, especially for mobile users. But we love the style.
Site address: Betweenthebread.com
Backyard Burgers
Having hundreds of pretty buttons and animations don’t always mean great design (we do like pretty buttons tho). And Backyard burgers prove this with a simple, yet effective design.
The points we love about the website is the excellent custom images, alongside easy to read text. The call to actions are easy to see and accessible, so you can view the burgers or find the locations without hunting through the website for the information.
Site address: Backyardburgers.com
Sea Harvest
Sea Harvest is an Australian fish and chip shop. The website might not be everyone’s taste, but the creativity is excellent with the whole layout being like a newspaper.
The date changes to today’s date, giving the idea of fresh fish and the fish being traditional wrapped in newspaper. Overall it has easy fun navigation and shows a unique take on web design.
Site address: Seaharvest.net.au
Mellow mushroom
Mellow Mushroom is a very playful website with excellent use of videos and animated gifs to keep the visitor engaged. We love the design of the background sections which resemble pizza slices.
There’s a lot of elements on the page, but it doesn’t distract you from that Saturday night pizza delivery or any other call to action.
Site address: Mellowmushroom.com
Fox in the Snow
Fox in the Snow is an excellent design for a cafe and restaurant, with the navigation on the left side of the screen with the menu and relevant information easily accessible.
This method frees up the centre off the screen, where they have images of the establishment and their Instagram feed bestowing lovely cakes and coffees that invite you to come to visit.
Site address: foxinthesnow.com
Restaurant Design Ideas
Below we have listed some great restaurant design ideas for your next project. We have separated them into different sections like the menu, main dish, ………
Menu design ideas
Having an inviting menu that customers can quickly check before visiting your restaurant is a necessity. Having an excellent menu to showcase your food is a necessity; there are many different styles to display your food, drinks and prices but have had picked a few great examples below.
Main Dish
Showing you are the main dish that you’re well known for on your homepage is a great idea. Do you have the best burgers in your city? Or maybe the best mouth-watering ribs? Below are some excellent examples of how to show your winning dish the right way.
Opening times
Opening times need to be on your restaurant’s website. If you don’t have clear opening times on your site, it decreases the chances the customer will come to your establishment. It doesn’t have to be over-complicated, it can be a small box to a full section on the homepage, or a separate section on the navigation combining hours & locations. We have put together some different examples below.
Bad restaurant websites
Good and bad restaurant website design is entirely subjective. Yet, I would judge what separates a great restaurant website from a bad website design is the user experience and if the site converts the visitor to a customer.
Can you see what’s on the restaurant’s website below? We cant too, the second screenshot is when you click the button showing there are actions and words. This is a very common design error with restaurants mainly because of the amazing images underneath the text making it very difficult to read.
The same thing happens with this website we found, the background changes from black to grey without the text changing making it impossible to read.
This one might be a bit nit-picky but we had to show it to get our point across. Usually, it’s a lot worse than this with the number or name being completely unreadable. Making this one of the most common problems with restaurant web design. It’s the imagery making the text unreadable.
Restaurant Graphic Design
Graphic design can help with your branding and get you to stand out from the crowd. Your restaurant’s graphic design can be used on your website, packaging, menus, promotional material.
Think of all the big restaurants and franchise chains, they use their branding colours, logo, fonts, and more, making them instantly recognisable with no extra effort. Graphic design goes hand in hand with website design and can be added to make a custom experience for your brand. There’s a lot to do with graphic design, so we have separated categories like: Menu, Logo
Menu
Logo
The restaurant below used their logo branding on every piece of material and even built it into the restaurant.
Conclusion
There are many moving parts with restaurant website design, we recommend building a website that fits into the aesthetic of your brand resulting in a seamless experience for the user. I.e, if you have a fine dining restaurant, the web design should reflect you establishment and not a hipster burger joint.
Hopefully, this post has helped spark a few ideas, when starting a new website project, we like to get a list of 10 websites in the same industry both local and national. Then we compare three key factors which are:
- The dwell time (time the user spends on the page)
- The bounce rate (the percentage of visitors viewing one page)
- The page views (total number of pages people visited on your site)
Then we find what websites are on top in each category and what makes them the best? We can then reverse engineer what’s working resulting in a data-driven design to create the best restaurant website.
What did you think about the list? Did you find it helpful?
If you want more information on restaurant website design and development check out or monthly website design, it’s an affordable service tailored to build you the best site possible. The first step always starts with getting in touch, so don’t hesitate to reach out.