Talay Tai — a Southern Thai 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.

This is yours already. Prove it.

Talay Tai is warm paper with an amber that comes off a curry pot rather than a sunset. 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.

The whole template, not a sample of it

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

Southern Thai cooking is hotter and more specific than the Thai food most guests have met, and the honest thing a website can do is say so before they sit down. This design opens on a heat scale — the dishes, ranked, with the kitchen’s own note about them — which is both useful and a statement of intent.

The ground is warm paper rather than dark, because this is daytime food photographed in daylight, and the accent is the amber of a pot that has been going for hours. The serif-and-sans pairing keeps regional dish names legible without dressing them up.

Pulling the home page apart

Eight blocks, built around a warning and an invitation:

• Hero — Big opening image, name & buttons, in the Heat Scale treatment: Named heat levels drawn as filled tracks beside the dish.
• Announcement — Slim notice bar at the top.
• Signature dish — One dish, full screen — name, story, price.
• Menu preview — A few dishes on a sliding rail.
• Text + image — A paragraph beside a photo.
• Values — Three guiding values.
• Reviews — Guest quotes with stars.
• Call to action — Headline + button band.

The menu: legible to guests, readable by Google

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 and lists the rest as type — the balance a regional menu needs, where a few dishes carry the argument and the rest support it.

The heat scale is the field that matters most here, and it is set per dish, honestly, rather than blanket-applied. Descriptions carry the region, the paste, the fish sauce; dietary marks travel alongside. All of it is structured, so a guest filtering for what they can eat is filtering on real data.

Whichever layout you choose, the point is the same: every dish, description and price is real text in the page with Restaurant schema around it, not a PDF and not a photograph of a laminated sheet.

Ordering: a delivery app that belongs to you

This is the part worth pressing. Talay Tai uses the Roomy rows ordering layout — the basket sits beside the menu rather than beneath it, so a table watches the bill build as they choose. The split ordering layout keeps the basket beside the menu rather than beneath it, which suits a cuisine ordered communally: several curries, rice, sides, and a running total that a table watches together.

Heat is an inline choice on the row, which is the single most-used modifier on a menu like this. On a phone the basket becomes a pinned bar; on a laptop it is a panel that follows the scroll, so the order is always visible while it is being built.

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 is where a regional kitchen argues its case: the province, the recipes, the family, the ingredients that have to be brought in. Narrative, sourcing, interview and gallery blocks all sit here, and the visit page carries the practical detail for a room that is often busier than it looks.

You will not be retyping the menu

This is the part that saves an afternoon. Take a picture of the menu you already have: the pressed card, the board behind the pass, a PDF from the printer. Back comes the whole menu as data: ordered sections, named dishes, their descriptions and prices, plus dietary and spice marks wherever the card showed them. Check it over — a smudged price or an ambitious accent is a two-second fix — and save.

What arrives is not a picture of a menu — it is real data. 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.

The search copy gets the same treatment: a Write with AI button reads the page and drafts its title and description, so those fields are never blank. Nothing is published on your behalf; the draft waits for you.

How long this actually takes

There is no build phase to wait through. Structure, styling and behaviour are done. Names, dishes and pictures are yours. Reckon on ten minutes to a published site, and reservations working from that same moment. Bookings land in your TableSpark inbox, and the guest gets a confirmation email straight away.

Taking money is a single connection: link Stripe and deposits on tables and payment on orders go straight to your own account. There is no cut for us — 0% commission on every plan. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments. Nobody else charges anything.

1. Pick Talay TaiThe 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

Moving it onto your own domain

A domain is signage, and signage matters. Nothing about going live depends on owning a domain first; connect yours later and the site simply answers to it.

The plumbing is ours: certificate, secure connection, redirect, and keeping canonical URLs, sitemap and robots pointing at the live address as the domain changes. Own it already? Good. The instruction is a single record, spelled out.

The email after the booking is yours to design

A confirmed booking is not the end of the conversation; it is the start of one. A confirmation is sent the second the booking lands, carrying the time, the covers, your address and contact details, and a self-service cancellation link. The same system sends the reminder before service, the deposit receipt and the cancellation notice.

The whole thing is yours to set, down to the sign-off. Six looks, one accent colour, your logo and cover photograph, the header layout, the sign-off line, and whichever links and social accounts you want on it. Add your domain and the from-line is yours too — the last detail that separates a real restaurant email from a system notification.

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

What is editable — which is nearly everything

• Yours from the first minute: names, headings, body copy, pictures, dishes, prices, opening times, the address, and every colour and typeface.
• Kept for you: everything that has to keep working at 200 dishes, at 390 pixels wide, and after you have changed every colour in the theme.
• Never locked: change the order of anything, remove whatever you do not want, add modules from the full library, and add or delete pages at will.

The difference between published and discovered

Putting a page online is not the same as delivering a restaurant site that search engines can reliably discover and understand. A misconfigured robots file, a noindex left in place, canonical tags in conflict, pages with no internal links, a PDF menu, missing Restaurant schema or incomplete verification — any one is enough to keep a live site invisible. You feel it in the margin — guests reach commission-charging platforms first, and demand you should own outright becomes demand you rent.

This template ships with that work done. No one can promise rankings or guaranteed indexing — but nothing here is left for you to hire a technician to assemble.

Questions before you start