Calabar — a spice-led restaurant website template

Starter is £19/mo excl. VAT and includes a complete restaurant website, a live structured menu, enquiry and newsletter forms, and managed search readiness. Growth is £39/mo excl. VAT and adds direct live bookings, a custom domain with managed SSL, and table and floor-plan operations. Full is £69/mo excl. VAT and adds online ordering and multi-site management for up to five restaurant sites. TableSpark commission is 0%. Stripe's standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.

Go on — change something.

Calabar sits on deep green-black with an orange that reads as heat rather than as autumn. Yours might be white tile and morning light, or brass and candles, or something nobody has built yet.

The controls beside the frame are not an illustration of the Theme tab — they are the Theme tab, driving the same engine that publishes real restaurants. Press whatever you like; nothing is stored and nothing is signed up for. Go on.

The entire site, page by page

6 pages, and every one of them is here. None of this is an image. The frame runs the real renderer — the one that publishes live restaurants — so each tab is the actual page and the links go where they say. Press Phone and watch it reflow.

The room this design is for

A kitchen built on West African pantry ingredients is doing something most guests have no reference for, and a website that leans on generic fine-dining cues wastes the opportunity. This design opens on a spice field — the ingredients themselves, named, at scale — which explains the restaurant faster than a paragraph could.

The ground is a deep green-black so that photographs of red oil, scotch bonnet and smoke sit on it without fighting. The type is a wide display face with a plain sans beneath, which gives unfamiliar ingredient names the confidence they need on first reading.

The home page, section by section

Eight blocks, arranged so ingredients lead:

• Hero — Big opening image, name & buttons, in the Spice Field treatment: Ground-this-morning spices as chips beside the plate.
• Marquee strip — Scrolling awards or words.
• Signature dish — One dish, full screen — name, story, price.
• Gallery — Grid, masonry or moving strip.
• Sourcing — The growers and makers behind the menu.
• Pull quote — A large standout quotation.
• Reviews — Guest quotes with stars.
• Reservation form — Live availability slot picker, saved to your Inbox.
• Call to action — Headline + button band.

The menu page — the most important page you own

This template uses the Accordion layout — sections sit collapsed on one screen and open in place, so a long menu never becomes a long scroll. An accordion is the right structure for a menu organised by ingredient rather than by course. Sections sit collapsed — the pantry visible in one screen — and the guest opens the ones that intrigue them, which is how an unfamiliar menu is actually read.

The description field is doing heavy lifting on a menu like this, and the layout gives it room: what the ingredient is, where it comes from, what it does. Heat levels are set per dish, which matters more here than almost anywhere, and dietary marks travel with them.

Layouts are a matter of taste. What is not optional is that every dish and price is readable text with Restaurant schema attached — a PDF menu would be invisible here.

Ordering, on your own terms

This is the part worth pressing. Calabar uses the Photo tiles ordering layout — every dish is a tile with an image, a price and an add button that becomes a quantity stepper. Photo tiles are the correct ordering layout for food people order with their eyes. Each dish gets an image, a price and a round add button that becomes a stepper as soon as it is in the basket.

Required choices — the accompaniment, the heat, the portion — sit as chips on the tile rather than opening a modal, so a full order is assembled without ever leaving the grid. The basket bar stays pinned with the count and the total.

Three modes, three sets of questions — a table number, a telephone number or an address — each one only what that order requires.

The story and visit pages

The story page carries the pantry argument: a narrative, a sourcing block naming the ingredients and where they come from, an interview and a gallery. The events page handles the supper clubs and collaborations that kitchens of this kind run constantly.

Photograph the menu. That is the whole job.

This is where most restaurant websites stall — and where this one does not. A phone photograph of the real menu is the whole input. Out the other side is a structured menu: your sections, your dishes, your wording, your prices, with the marks read from the card itself. You get the last word: the review screen shows every field before anything is written.

A menu locked in a PDF is a dead end. This is not that. The same structured menu drives the menu page, the ordering page, the highlights on the home page and the Restaurant structured data a search engine reads. Change a price once afterwards and all of them follow.

Each page also has a Write with AI button that drafts the search title and description from what is actually on that page, so the fields that decide whether Google shows you are never left empty. The wording arrives in the field, not on the live site — review it first.

Live in ten minutes, booking in eleven

What usually takes a project plan takes a coffee break. It is a complete restaurant site that happens to be about somebody else. Fixing that is the job. A ten-minute job for most restaurants, and there is no separate switch to flick for bookings — they work on publish. Every reservation arrives in your inbox and the guest is emailed a confirmation immediately.

Connect Stripe — it takes about a minute — and the site starts taking deposits on bookings and payment on orders, into your account. You keep the order. TableSpark charges 0% commission at every level. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.

1. Pick CalabarEverything copies across — pages, blocks, menu, the lot.
   1 min
2. Change the name and the wordsEvery block is edited in place. Change the name once.
   4 min
3. Upload your menuA photograph of the menu becomes a structured menu.
   3 min
4. PublishLive. The reservation form starts working immediately.
   1 min
5. Connect StripeNow you can take deposits on tables and payment on orders — direct to your account.
   1 min

Your domain, our plumbing

Your address is the last piece of the name, and it belongs to you. Publish today on a TableSpark address, then point your own domain at it whenever it suits: the one already printed on your windows and listed on Google.

We handle what usually needs a technician — the SSL certificate and its renewals, the bare-domain redirect, and the canonical signals that stop a move from costing you visibility. Domains you already hold are welcome, and the change is one line in your registrar.

The email nobody thinks about, designed properly

The booking is not the last thing a guest hears from you — it is the first. Each booking triggers an email in your name: the date and time they chose, how many are coming, where to find you, and a link to hand the table back if plans move. Reminders before service, deposit receipts and cancellation notices come from the same place.

It belongs to your restaurant visually, not to the software. The choices are six base designs, an accent colour, a logo, a cover photograph, three header treatments, a personal sign-off, links and social marks. With your domain connected it also sends from your address, so the email is from the restaurant in every sense a guest can check.

The frame below is the real thing: it is drawn by the same renderer the booking system uses, not a picture of one. Press a style or a colour and watch it change.

The line between the design and your restaurant

• Yours from the first minute: text, photographs, menu, prices, hours, address, colours, typefaces — everything a guest can see.
• Kept for you: the invisible work — menus that scale, baskets that behave, layouts that reflow, and type that stays readable on every ground.
• Never locked: add, remove and reorder blocks anywhere, and do the same with pages. What ships is a first draft of your site, not a contract.

Being on the internet is not being in search

A working address is the beginning of search visibility, not the end of it. The failure modes are boring and fatal: a noindex tag, canonicals that contradict each other, pages nothing points at, a menu only a human can read, no restaurant structured data, unverified search accounts. The consequence is paid discovery. Someone types your restaurant’s name and meets a listings site, a marketplace, or the place across the road.

The whole checklist is done for you. Nobody can guarantee a ranking or that Google will index a given page; what can be guaranteed is that the technical groundwork is not your problem.

The questions we get asked