Lao Phet — a Thai-Chinese 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.

Nothing here is precious. Try it.

Lao Phet is warm paper with a red that belongs on a shophouse door. 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.

Go through it like a guest would

6 pages, and every one of them is here. Everything below is rendered, not photographed. The frame uses the same engine as a published site, so the tabs and the in-page links are all real. Phone shows the mobile layout.

The room it imagines

A Thai-Chinese kitchen is telling a story about a family and a building as much as about food, and the design gives that story somewhere to live. The opening is a broth-and-tables board — what is simmering, how many floors, when the room is open — which is a far more truthful hero for a shophouse restaurant than a plated close-up.

The ground is warm paper rather than the near-black that fine dining defaults to, because this is a room with daylight in it. The red accent is the one on the door of every shophouse in the district, and the high-contrast serif carries the heritage without a single decorative flourish.

The home page, block by block

Nine blocks, all of them editable:

• Hero — Big opening image, name & buttons, in the Broth & Tables treatment: Broths as chips, free tables and service hours on a dark strip.
• Pull quote — A large standout quotation.
• Menu preview — A few dishes on a sliding rail.
• Numbers — Headline stats.
• Seasonal calendar — What each month or season brings.
• Gallery — Grid, masonry or moving strip.
• Press bar — Press mentions or awards as a ruled band.
• Reservation form — Live availability slot picker, saved to your Inbox.
• Call to action — Headline + button band.

The menu page: a printed menu a search engine can read

This template uses the Editorial layout — each section opens on its signature plate, then the dishes are set as type in ruled columns, the way a printed card reads. The editorial layout — a plate per section, then dishes as ruled type — suits a menu that is telling a lineage. Each section can carry a sentence about where the dish sits between the two kitchens, and the guest reads it as a card rather than scrolling a gallery.

Dishes with a story need the description field, and this menu expects it used: the generation that brought the recipe, the substitution that made it Thai, the technique that stayed Chinese. Prices, heat levels and dietary marks are structured fields, so they stay consistent across the menu page, the ordering page and the search data.

The layout can change; what does not is that each dish, its description and its price are text on the page, wrapped in Restaurant schema — rather than a PDF or a picture of a card.

Take the order yourself

This is the part worth pressing. Lao Phet 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. Ordering runs as dense rows, which is the layout for a kitchen whose baskets are large and various — five small plates, two rice, a soup, three drinks. Compact rows keep the whole order visible while it is being built.

The running total is the feature that matters at this basket size, and it never leaves the screen: a pinned bar on a phone, a following panel on a laptop. Modifiers appear as chips on the row, so choosing a portion or a heat level does not interrupt the flow.

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

Where the restaurant explains itself

The story page is the reason a restaurant like this exists, and it gets the full treatment: narrative, quote, interview, a timeline that can span generations, and a gallery of the building. The reservations page handles the bookings, and the visit page explains a building that is often harder to find than a street address suggests.

The typing is already done

Start with the job everyone puts off. Photograph your menu — the printed card, the chalkboard, the laminated takeaway sheet — and upload it. It comes back as a real menu — sections in order, dishes, descriptions, prices, dietary marks and spice levels, all filled in. It lands in front of you for approval first, with every value editable.

The important part: this is structured data, not an image of a menu. From there the same data runs 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.

Every page carries a Write with AI button for the search title and description — it reads the page you are on and writes the first draft. Read it, sharpen it, publish it. The order matters.

Publish today, take bookings tonight

There is no kick-off call and no staging link to approve. Everything is designed and wired — you are changing the words and the photographs. Ten minutes, give or take, and it is live — with the reservation form answering immediately. Both sides get told at once — the booking in your inbox, the confirmation in theirs.

Money is one connection away. Link your Stripe account and the site can take deposits on bookings and payment on orders, paid directly to you. No per-order fee, no revenue share, 0% commission on any plan. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.

1. Pick Lao PhetAll the pages and the demo menu copy into your account.
   1 min
2. Change the name and the wordsType over anything. The restaurant name updates throughout.
   4 min
3. Upload your menuThe menu is built from a photograph rather than typed.
   3 min
4. PublishPublished — and the booking form answers from that moment.
   1 min
5. Connect StripeNow you can take deposits on tables and payment on orders — direct to your account.
   1 min

Your name over the door

The address on your napkins should be the address that loads. Start on a TableSpark address, then bring your own domain across — the site does not change, only the name it answers to.

The certificate, its renewal, the secure connection and the redirects are managed here, along with the canonical and sitemap signals that make a domain move safe. Bring your own, and the setup screen tells you the one value to paste and where.

The confirmation email, in your own branding

A confirmation email is the only piece of your restaurant a guest keeps in their pocket for a week. The guest is emailed straight away with the particulars — date, time, party size, address, phone — and a link to release the table themselves. Service reminders, deposit receipts and cancellations all travel on the same design.

You are not stuck with our house style. Choose from six styles and make the rest yours: accent colour, logo, cover photograph, header layout, sign-off, links and social accounts. Connect the domain and the sender address becomes yours, which is what makes it read as genuinely from you.

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.

Where the template ends and you begin

• Yours from the first minute: all copy, all imagery, the entire menu with its prices, hours, address, and the colour and type choices underneath.
• Kept for you: the engineering underneath: long menus, small screens, reflowing sections, and contrast that survives your colour choices.
• Never locked: rearrange every page, drop blocks you dislike, pull in new ones, and add or delete pages entirely. The structure is a suggestion.

What it takes to actually be found

Publishing a page and being present in search are separate achievements. A site can be live at a working link and still be missing from Google: a stray noindex, conflicting canonicals, orphaned pages, a menu locked inside a PDF, missing structured restaurant data or unfinished search verification will each do it. That gap gets filled by directories and marketplaces, which are delighted to charge you for guests who were already looking for you by name.

That groundwork is already laid here. Neither rankings nor indexing can be guaranteed by anyone — but the setup that so often prevents them is complete here.

Before you begin