Riva 9 — an Italian 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.

Do not read this bit. Touch it.

Riva 9 is a deep green-black with a terracotta orange, the colours of a shaded terrace at two in the afternoon. 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

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

An Italian restaurant with a view sells the afternoon as much as the food, and the design is arranged accordingly: a dark, warm ground that makes daylight photography glow, and a hero that leads on today’s pasta rather than the restaurant’s name.

That choice is deliberate. Guests looking at a lakeside restaurant are deciding whether to spend three hours there, and the fastest way to answer them is to say what is being made today. Everything else — the room, the terrace, the cellar — follows underneath.

The home page, section by section

Nine blocks, arranged around a long lunch:

• Hero — Big opening image, name & buttons, in the Pasta of the Day treatment: The week of pastas ruled beside the dining room.
• Intro statement — Big opening statement line.
• Menu preview — A few dishes on a sliding rail.
• Image break — Full-width image band with optional caption.
• Signature dish — One dish, full screen — name, story, price.
• Gallery — Grid, masonry or moving strip.
• Reviews — Guest quotes with stars.
• Call to action — Headline + button band.

The statement block currently reads Flour, eggs and patience — pasta rolled at noon, gone by ten. — one line you will rewrite in about four seconds.

The menu page — the most important page you own

This template uses the Compact layout — a tight priced list with no photography — the density a menu of composed plates actually wants. A compact carte is right for an Italian menu organised the traditional way — antipasti, primi, secondi, dolci — where the guest knows the structure and is scanning within it. Photographs of every plate would slow that down rather than help it.

What the layout does give room to is the sentence under each dish: the shape of the pasta, the lake fish, the producer. Set menus sit alongside as their own block, which is how a tasting menu should appear next to a carte rather than being appended to it.

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. Riva 9 uses the Classic list ordering layout — the printed-menu look, with dotted leaders running from each dish to its price. The ordering page runs as a classic priced list with dotted leaders, which reads like the printed card and suits a restaurant selling composed plates rather than fast food.

It is still a working basket: quantities, inline choices, a total that stays visible, and collection or delivery asking only for what each needs. Payment goes to your own Stripe account, with no commission taken by TableSpark. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.

Dine-in wants a table number and nothing else; collection wants a number to ring; delivery wants somewhere to go. No mode asks for the others’ fields.

Where the restaurant explains itself

The story page has room for the family, the lake and the cellar — a narrative, a timeline, an interview and a gallery. The reservations page handles bookings for a room where lunch and dinner behave completely differently, and the visit page covers the terrace, the parking and the season.

The menu builds itself from a photograph

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. 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.

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.

Ten minutes, then you are open

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 Riva 9The 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

Your domain, our plumbing

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.

What lands in the guest’s inbox

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.

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

Yours, ours, and never locked

• 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.

Live is not the same as findable

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