Case study — Modern Mexican restaurant
Rosalía
The menu is the hero, so the menu is the typography
- Vertical
- Modern Mexican restaurant
- Year
- 2026
- Tier
- Studio
- Pages
- 4
Demonstration build
The whole site is live. Go and click around.
01 — The brief
What the client came in with.
The menu lived in a PDF. On a phone it was a pinch-and-zoom nightmare, it was invisible to search engines, and updating a single price meant emailing a designer.
The kitchen changes dishes weekly. Anything that made updates expensive was going to be abandoned within a month.
02 — The approach
Three decisions that shaped the build.
- 01
Menu as structured content
Every dish is a typed record with name, description, price and dietary flags. It renders as editorial type on the page, is readable by search engines, and a price change is a one-line edit.
- 02
Display serif at magazine scale
Dish names are set large enough to read across a table. Section dividers use a single hairline rule and a mono label, borrowing the restraint of a printed menu.
- 03
Reservation flow without a login
Party size, date and time in three taps, with no account creation. The form validates client-side and states its confirmation window explicitly.
03 — Identity system
Typography
- Display
- Playfair Display
- Body
- Source Sans 3
A high-contrast didone-adjacent serif for dish names, with a humanist sans carrying the descriptions and dietary notes.
Palette
Cochineal
oklch(44% 0.165 22)
Clay
oklch(64% 0.11 44)
Bone
oklch(94% 0.016 80)
Charred
oklch(22% 0.028 30)
Built
- Four-section menu with dietary flags and prices
- Reservation form with party size and sitting selection
- Story page with the kitchen's sourcing notes
- Private-dining enquiry section
- Hours and location block with transit directions
04 — The build, by the numbers
- Pages built
- 4Pages built
- Menu items as data
- 26Menu items as data
- Taps to reserve
- 3Taps to reserve