The Magistrate — a 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.

Do not read this bit. Touch it.

The Magistrate is warm paper with a rose-red that sits somewhere between lacquer and a stamped seal. Yours might be white tile and morning light, or brass and candles, or something nobody has built yet.

Skip the description. The panel is lifted straight out of the builder and the frame is the real renderer, so what happens when you press an accent here is exactly what happens in your account. Nothing you do is saved or asked about. Go on.

Open it properly

6 pages, and every one of them is here. Not screenshots. The frame is running the publishing renderer, so the navigation inside it works and every tab is a real page. Switch to Phone to see how it behaves on a handset.

The room it imagines

A restaurant whose defining feature is a single long table needs a website that says so immediately, because it changes what a booking means. The hero leads with the table, the sittings and the way in — a guest understands within seconds that they are joining a room, not reserving a private corner.

The design stays warm and typographic throughout: paper ground, one red, a wide display face and a plain sans. There is no jade, no gold and no dragon anywhere, which is a design decision as much as a cultural one.

The home page, block by block

Nine blocks, arranged around one table:

• Hero — Big opening image, name & buttons, in the One Long Table treatment: One sitting, seats left and the price on a card over the table.
• Intro statement — Big opening statement line.
• Feature rows — Alternating image and text rows.
• Press bar — Press mentions or awards as a ruled band.
• Menu preview — A few dishes on a sliding rail.
• 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 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.

A menu that reads like a card and indexes like a page

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 — carries a Cantonese carte properly: enough imagery to show the standard, enough type to list the range without a photograph of everything.

Bilingual names are handled natively with a language switch in the header, and the description line carries the technique rather than the adjective — the steaming time, the cut, the sauce. Structured, indexable, and consistent across every page that reads from the menu.

Layouts are a matter of taste. What is not optional is that every dish and price is readable text with Restaurant schema attached — a PDF menu would be invisible here.

Ordering, on your own terms

This is the part worth pressing. The Magistrate uses the Delivery app ordering layout — sections run down a rail on the left, the dish list swaps beside them without losing your place, and the basket follows the scroll. The full delivery-app layout is right here: a section rail down the side, dishes beside it, and a basket that follows. A Cantonese kitchen with a takeaway trade is competing with the apps directly, and this is the interaction guests have been trained on.

The difference is who keeps the relationship. The order lands in your inbox, the guest record is yours to export, the page sits on your own domain, and TableSpark takes 0% — a marketplace takes a cut of every order and keeps the customer.

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 carries the room, the family and the sourcing — narrative, timeline, interview, gallery. Reservations get their own page because a communal table needs bookings managed carefully, and the visit page handles a door that is easy to walk past.

The typing is already done

Nobody starts a website looking forward to retyping ninety dishes. Point a phone at whatever your menu currently lives on and send it over. The AI turns it into sections, dishes, descriptions and prices, and picks up the dietary marks and heat levels it can see. Read it back, adjust anything the photograph fumbled, and that is the menu built.

A photograph of a menu is decoration; a structured menu is infrastructure. That same menu immediately 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.

And the fields nobody enjoys writing — the search title and description — are drafted by a Write with AI button that reads the page first. The AI writes the first version; you decide whether it is the last.

Live in ten minutes, booking in eleven

You are not commissioning a website; you are moving into one. The site works from the first second — it simply has the wrong name on the door. Ten minutes covers it for most kitchens — and the second it is live, the booking form is taking reservations. It lands in the inbox with the party size and the time, and the guest is confirmed by email at once.

Attach your own Stripe account and the site can charge for orders and hold deposits on tables — the funds are yours from the start. We take 0%. Not on the first order, not on the thousandth. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.

1. Pick The MagistrateEverything copies across — pages, blocks, menu, the lot.
   1 min
2. Change the name and the wordsEvery block is edited in place. Change the name once.
   4 min
3. Upload your menuA photograph of the menu becomes a structured menu.
   3 min
4. PublishLive. The reservation form starts working 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 web address is something guests read aloud, so it should sound like you. You can be live before lunch on a TableSpark address and on your own domain by the weekend, with no rebuild in between.

Everything fiddly about a domain — SSL, renewals, bare-domain redirects, canonical URLs surviving the move — is managed on your behalf. Already own the name? Keep it — you get the exact record to update, in plain English.

The confirmation email, in your own branding

The email that follows a booking is read more carefully than any page on the site. As soon as a table is confirmed, the guest gets an email in your name carrying the date, the time, the number of covers, your address, your phone number and a way to cancel cleanly. Reminders, receipts and cancellations follow the same treatment, so nothing looks bolted on.

It carries your restaurant, not our branding. Pick one of six templates, then set the accent, the logo, a cover image, how the header sits, the sign-off line, your links and your social marks. When your domain is connected the mail is sent from your own address, which is also what keeps it out of a promotions tab.

Below is the actual renderer, the one that sends after a confirmed booking. Press any of the styles or colours and it rebuilds in front of you.

Yours, ours, and never locked

• Yours from the first minute: every word and every image, the menu and what it costs, the hours you keep, where you are, and the colours and fonts the site is built from.
• Kept for you: the difficult engineering — long-menu behaviour, the basket on a small screen, how blocks stack when the window narrows, and legibility surviving a palette change.
• Never locked: reorder, remove or add any block on any page, add whole pages, and throw away anything you do not need. This is a starting point, not a cage.

Live is not the same as findable

Being published and being findable are two different things, and only one of them happens automatically. The usual culprits are mundane: a robots rule nobody removed, two canonicals pointing different ways, orphaned pages, the menu published as a PDF, no structured restaurant data, search verification half done. The cost lands on the restaurant — guests searching your name, your menu or your street reach directories and commission-charging marketplaces first, and you end up paying for the traffic you should already own.

All of that is finished before you arrive. Search results are not something anyone can promise you. A correctly configured site is, and that is what this is.

What restaurants ask us