La Crête — a counter dining 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.

Take it for a drive.

La Crête is a dark room with a vermilion accent that behaves like a lantern. Yours might be white tile and morning light, or brass and candles, or something nobody has built yet.

This is the product, not a picture of it. Left, the live site. Right, the builder’s own Theme panel. Everything you press takes effect immediately, nothing persists, and there is no sign-in wall in front of it. Go on.

Now walk the whole thing

5 pages, and every one of them is here. Nothing below is a screenshot: the frame renders it through the same engine that publishes your site, so every tab is the real page and every link inside it works. Switch to Phone to watch the same design reflow.

Why it looks like this

A counter with a queue outside it is selling something specific: a short menu, done exactly, at speed. The design opens with the queue itself — the wait, the hours, what is being served — which is both honest and, for the right guest, a genuine invitation.

A dark ground with a vermilion accent gives the food photography a warm surround, and the wide display face keeps a short menu of short names looking deliberate rather than sparse.

Everything on the home page, named

Eight blocks, arranged for a room with a queue:

• Hero — Big opening image, name & buttons, in the Ramen Queue treatment: Bowls-left badge, queue time and service window beside the bowl.
• Intro statement — Big opening statement line.
• Feature rows — Alternating image and text rows.
• Menu preview — A few dishes on a sliding rail.
• Press bar — Press mentions or awards as a ruled band.
• Ambience — Full-width video or photo mood band.
• Reviews — Guest quotes with stars.
• Newsletter — Email signup band.
• Call to action — Headline + button band.

The statement block currently reads Counter seats, charcoal smoke, and the discipline of doing few things completely. — one line you will rewrite in about four seconds.

How the menu is set, and why it matters twice

This template uses the Index layout — the sections are listed first and open in turn, so the shape of the whole menu is visible before any single dish is. An indexed menu is right for a short list where the sections are the choice: the bowls, the sides, the extras. The guest sees the whole menu at once and picks within it.

Descriptions carry the broth, the noodle and the age; dietary marks travel per dish. Because it is structured text, a search for a specific preparation can land on your menu page rather than on a review site.

Any of the layouts leaves the substance intact: real text for every dish, description and price, marked up as Restaurant data rather than published as an image.

The ordering page: same habit, different economics

This is the part worth pressing. La Crête uses the Dense rows ordering layout — compact rows that keep a large order visible while it is being built, with the running total pinned in view. Dense rows are the layout for a takeaway list that has to be assembled fast — compact, scannable, and quick to add from.

Extras and sizes are inline chips on each row, the total stays on screen, and collection asks only for a name and a number. Payment goes into your own Stripe account, with 0% commission taken by us. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.

Dine-in asks for a table number, collection asks for a phone number, delivery asks for an address — and each mode only asks for what it actually needs.

Story, visit, and the practical pages

The story page carries the chef and the technique — narrative, interview, timeline and gallery. The visit page handles the practicalities of a queue: when to come, how long the wait usually is, and how the counter works.

Send a photograph, get a structured menu

The menu is the longest thing on any restaurant site, and it is the thing you type least. Whatever the menu is printed on, photograph it and upload it; the format does not matter. TableSpark reads it and builds the structured menu for you: sections in the right order, dish names, descriptions, prices, and the dietary and spice marks where it can see them. You review it, fix anything the camera got wrong, and it is done.

The distinction that matters is that a search engine can read every word of it. Everything downstream reads from it: 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.

A Write with AI button on each page writes the search title and description from what is on it, so no page publishes with those fields empty. Always your last word — the draft lands in the field for you to edit before anything publishes.

From nothing to taking reservations, in ten minutes

The gap between deciding and being live is measured in minutes, not weeks. The template is already a finished site; the work is making it yours. Ten minutes is a fair estimate from first login to a live address, and bookings start working the instant you publish. Reservations collect in your TableSpark inbox and each guest is confirmed by email automatically.

Payments are one link away. Connect Stripe and deposits and order payments flow directly to you. Zero commission, permanently. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments. That is the end of the list.

1. Pick La CrêteThe full site arrives in your account as a working draft.
   1 min
2. Change the name and the wordsRewrite the words by clicking them; the name carries everywhere.
   4 min
3. Upload your menuSend the menu in as a photograph and check what comes back.
   3 min
4. PublishIt goes live on your address and starts taking bookings.
   1 min
5. Connect StripeNow you can take deposits on tables and payment on orders — direct to your account.
   1 min

Run it on your own domain

What is printed at the bottom of the menu should be your own. Go live immediately on a TableSpark address, and swap in your own domain at any point afterwards — including one you already own.

Certificates, HTTPS, the redirect from the naked domain and the search-engine housekeeping around a move are all handled for you. Bring a domain you already own, and we will tell you exactly which record to change.

Every booking sends an email — in your colours

Between booking and arriving, the confirmation email is the whole relationship. The moment a guest books, TableSpark sends them a confirmation on your behalf: the date, the time, the party size, where you are, how to reach you, and a link to release the table if their plans change. The pre-service reminder, the deposit receipt and the cancellation note share it.

None of it has to look like us. Six designs to start from, plus your colour, your logo, a photograph, the header treatment, your own closing line, your links and your socials. Connect your domain and it sends from your address too — so what lands in a guest’s inbox looks like it came from the restaurant, because it did.

The email below is being generated live by the same code that sends it for real. Try the templates and the accent colours.

What you change, and what stays

• Yours from the first minute: the wording anywhere on the site, the photographs, the menu and prices, your hours and location, and the palette and typefaces.
• Kept for you: the parts that break when hand-built: a menu that still reads at two hundred dishes, a basket that works one-handed, and contrast that holds whatever colour you choose.
• Never locked: add, delete or reorder any section on any page. Add pages. Delete the ones you do not want. The template is the starting line.

Built to be found, not just to be live

There is a gap between a website that loads and a website that gets found, and it is wider than most owners expect. Working link, zero visibility. It happens through stray noindex rules, conflicting canonicals, orphaned pages, PDF menus, absent structured data and unfinished verification. And the restaurant pays for it: people searching your own name find aggregators and commission-charging platforms instead, so you rent back an audience that was yours.

It is handled in the box, not in an add-on. No guarantees about rankings or indexing exist anywhere in this industry. What exists here is the technical work, finished.

Common questions