Mei Court — a Cantonese 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.

Mei Court is warm paper with a rose-red that belongs to a lacquer box. Yours might be white tile and morning light, or brass and candles, or something nobody has built yet.

There is no demo video and no sales call. What you see on the right is the actual Theme panel from the builder, wired to the actual site renderer on the left. Press a colour. It will not ask you to register and it will not remember what you did. Go on.

Go through it like a guest would

5 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 it imagines

Refined Cantonese cooking is undersold by menus that read like a takeaway list — three hundred numbered items with no hierarchy. This design fixes the hierarchy first: a warm paper ground, generous space, and a layout that lets the kitchen show fifteen dishes properly rather than three hundred badly.

The opening is a seatings board, which is the honest structure for a room that runs two or three services and takes bookings for both. It carries the sittings, tonight’s dish and the route to a table before anything else.

The home page, block by block

Eight blocks, built for a room with services rather than opening hours:

• Hero — Big opening image, name & buttons, in the Omakase Seatings treatment: Circular dish over two seating times, one of them full.
• Intro statement — Big opening statement line.
• Menu preview — A few dishes on a sliding rail.
• Signature dish — One dish, full screen — name, story, price.
• Image break — Full-width image band with optional caption.
• Gallery — Grid, masonry or moving strip.
• Reviews — Guest quotes with stars.
• Call to action — Headline + button band.

The statement block currently reads Roast meats in the window, claypots on the crust — Cantonese cooking with its sleeves rolled up. — one line you will rewrite in about four seconds.

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

This template uses the Plate layout — every section leads on one photographed dish and lists the rest as type — imagery where it persuades, type where it informs. The plated layout gives each section its signature dish as a photograph, then lists the rest as type. That is the compromise a long Cantonese menu needs: enough imagery to convey the standard of the kitchen, without demanding a photograph of every one of two hundred items.

Set menus and banquets are the commercial core of a room like this, and they are handled as their own structure — courses listed, price per head stated, minimum numbers noted — rather than being squeezed into the à la carte. Bilingual dish names are handled natively, with a language switch in the header.

Whatever the arrangement, the menu is text and not a picture — every dish, description and price indexable, with Restaurant schema around it.

Ordering, on your own terms

This is the part worth pressing. Mei Court 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. The ordering page uses photo tiles, which is the right choice for dim sum and small plates: guests order more when they can see what they are ordering, and a tile grid handles forty items without becoming a wall of text.

Portion and quantity choices sit as chips on each tile, and the basket stays on screen with a running total — which matters when a table of six is assembling an order of twenty items. Dine-in asks for a table number so the kitchen knows where it is going.

Each mode collects only what it must: a table number for dine-in, a telephone number for collection, an address for delivery.

The story and visit pages

The story page carries the kitchen’s lineage, an interview and a gallery of the room. The visit page does more work than usual for a restaurant like this — floor, building, the lift, how to find a door that is not at street level — all of it real text a guest can read before they arrive.

The typing is already done

Here is the hour you were dreading, deleted. Photograph the card, the board or the takeaway sheet — up to ten pages at a time — and hand it to TableSpark. It is read into proper fields — section, dish, description, price, dietary marks, spice level — rather than pasted in as a lump of text. Then you read it through, correct whatever the lens misread, and save.

It behaves like data, because it is data. 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.

For the search snippet, a Write with AI button drafts the title and description out of the page itself. It is a draft, not a decision: edit it, then publish.

Live in ten minutes, booking in eleven

Nothing here needs to be built, because it already is. The hard parts are finished; the personal parts are not, and only you can do those. Most restaurants go from opening the builder to a published site on their own address inside ten minutes, and the reservation form answers from the moment it publishes. You see it in the inbox, they see a confirmation in theirs, both within seconds.

Add your Stripe account and the same site takes booking deposits and order payments, with the money landing in your account rather than ours. TableSpark takes 0% commission at every plan level. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments. Nothing else is deducted.

1. Pick Mei CourtThe whole site copies into your account, menu and all.
   1 min
2. Change the name and the wordsClick any block and type. The restaurant name propagates everywhere.
   4 min
3. Upload your menuPhotograph it and let the AI build the sections, dishes and prices.
   3 min
4. PublishYou are live on your address. Bookings work immediately.
   1 min
5. Connect StripeNow you can take deposits on tables and payment on orders — direct to your account.
   1 min

The address should be yours

An address is branding that people type. The TableSpark address gets you live in minutes; your own domain takes over the moment you want it to, with nothing rebuilt.

TableSpark manages the technical side: the certificate, the secure connection, the redirect from the bare domain to the one you chose, and keeping search engines pointed at the right address so the move does not cost you what you have already earned. An existing domain works fine. You get one instruction, not a documentation site.

The email nobody thinks about, designed properly

What lands in the inbox after a booking is doing more work than most restaurants realise. The confirmation goes out immediately: date and time, party size, the address and phone number, and a link that releases the table if something changes. It also carries the reminder the day before, the deposit receipt and any cancellation.

The design is not a TableSpark email with your name in it — it is your email. Six templates to choose between, then colour, logo, cover image, header style, sign-off wording, links and socials are all yours to set. Hook up the domain and even the sender is you.

That is a real email, produced here by the same renderer the booking flow uses. The buttons above it work.

Where the template ends and you begin

• Yours from the first minute: the name over the door, all the words, every photograph, the menu, the prices, your hours and address, and the whole palette and type system.
• Kept for you: the mechanics — how a very long menu paginates, how ordering behaves on a phone, how every block reflows, and how text stays readable against any background you pick.
• Never locked: reorder or delete any section, add any module, and add or remove pages. The template is where you begin, not where you must stay.

Being on the internet is not being in search

Any tool can put a page on the internet. Fewer can make sure a search engine understands what is on it. It fails quietly: noindex directives nobody noticed, conflicting canonical URLs, orphan pages, menus buried in PDFs, no structured data about the restaurant, and search verification that was never completed. The bill arrives as dependence — guests looking for your kitchen land on a directory or a marketplace that charges you for the introduction.

This is packaged into the site rather than sold separately. There is no promise of a position or of being indexed, because nobody can make one. There is a promise that you will not be hiring someone to fix the basics.

The questions we get asked