A Moroccan restaurant that was invisible online
The client
Tagine Cuisine is a Moroccan restaurant in Abuja, open since 2024. In person the room and the food do the work. Online it looked like every other listing: a phone number, an address, and a few dim photographs that could have been any restaurant in the city.
The brief
Two problems wearing one coat. The restaurant did not come across online, so the atmosphere and the menu that make people choose it were not visible to anybody deciding where to eat. And bookings ran entirely through a telephone that only worked when somebody was standing next to it, which meant tables were lost every evening the line went unanswered and every hour the restaurant was closed.
What we did
- Brand identity first. Logo, colour palette and typography, so the website had something coherent to be built on rather than being decorated afterwards.
- A site that leads with the room and the food. Full width photography and a short honest description before any list of dishes, because those are the things that actually make somebody book.
- A menu the team can edit. Built so staff change dishes and prices themselves, with no developer and no phone call.
- Reservations that work one handed. A booking flow designed for a phone held in one hand on mobile data, taking the date, the party size and the contact details the restaurant needs.
The result
Reservations now arrive outside opening hours, which the old telephone only system captured none of. The busiest week so far brought four bookings through the site, all of them at times when nobody would have been there to answer the phone. The menu stays current because the team changes it themselves rather than waiting on anyone.
Why a restaurant site is mostly two pages
People do not browse a restaurant website. They want to know what it looks like inside, what is on the menu, roughly what it costs, and how to get a table. Everything else is decoration, and most restaurant sites bury those four things behind a slideshow and an About Us.
So the site was built around them. The photography carries the room, the menu is one tap away and always current, and the booking step never asks for anything the restaurant does not need. A shorter site that answers the real questions beats a longer one that answers questions nobody asked.
Services used
Website design and build · Branding and identity · Graphic design
