— Trattoria di quartiere · 2026
La VELA.
A neighbourhood Italian restaurant — the kind where the chef knows your dog. The brief asked for a site that lets the menu do the heavy lifting, with reservations one tap away. No stock photos of pasta. No "our story" video. Just terracotta, candlelight, and what's actually on the plate tonight.
— i. The brief
The menu is the home page.
Most restaurant sites bury the menu three clicks deep, behind a hero video and an "about our chef" novella. La Vela reverses that. The home page is tonight's menu — antipasti, primi, secondi, dolci, set in DM Serif Display like a printed program.
The rest of the site (the story, the room, the reservations) lives in service of that menu. Scroll past it, you get the room. Tap a dish, you get the wine pairing. Tap reserve, you're at OpenTable.
— ii. La cucina
The room, the plates, the people.
— iii. Reserve a table
Quattro coperti o quaranta — tutto bene.
Demo only — connects to OpenTable on production."Il cibo non è solo nutrimento. È il modo in cui diciamo: ti voglio bene."
— Nonna Rosa, on opening night, 1971 → still pinned above the pass
— v. The build
WordPress, but you'd never know.
- CMS
- WordPress · ACF for nightly menu updates
- Reservations
- OpenTable embed with custom-styled widget
- Menu
- Updates from a Google Sheet via Zapier
- Type
- DM Serif Display · DM Sans · Allura (accents)
- Performance
- ~60 KB CSS · no JS framework
- SEO
- Schema.org Restaurant + Menu markup