Yamabiko — a Japanese 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.

Press something. It is your restaurant now.

Yamabiko is black with a vermilion that appears once, like a seal on paper. Yours might be white tile and morning light, or brass and candles, or something nobody has built yet.

Rather than explain, here is the thing itself: the builder’s Theme controls on one side, the live site on the other, both real. You cannot break it, nothing saves, and no account is required to have a go. Go on.

The whole template, not a sample of it

6 pages, and every one of them is here. What follows is the site itself rather than pictures of it. The same engine that publishes a live restaurant is drawing it here, links and all. The Phone toggle shows the small-screen version.

Why it looks like this

A satoyama kitchen is cooking a landscape rather than a cuisine, and the website has to convey that before it conveys anything about dinner. The vitrine opening does it with a single held image and almost no text — the discipline of a museum case rather than a menu board.

Black ground, one vermilion, a soft serif over a plain sans, and generous silence between every element. Nothing on the page is competing with the photography, which for a kitchen of this kind is the entire argument.

Pulling the home page apart

Nine blocks, with silence between them:

• Hero — Big opening image, name & buttons, in the Vitrine treatment: Three tall frames with the name set on a plate across the seams.
• Intro statement — Big opening statement line.
• Signature dish — One dish, full screen — name, story, price.
• Menu preview — A few dishes on a sliding rail.
• Scroll story — Numbered chapters beside a pinned photo.
• Press bar — Press mentions or awards as a ruled band.
• Reviews — Guest quotes with stars.
• Ambience — Full-width video or photo mood band.
• Call to action — Headline + button band.

The statement block currently reads Counter seats, charcoal smoke, and the discipline of doing few things completely. — one line you will rewrite in about four seconds.

The menu page, and why it is text

This template uses the Accordion layout — sections sit collapsed on one screen and open in place, so a long menu never becomes a long scroll. The accordion suits a kaiseki structure exactly: the courses named in sequence, collapsed, so the guest sees the whole shape of the meal on one screen and opens whichever one they want to understand.

The description field carries the season, the province, the technique. Because a menu like this changes every few weeks, keeping it as structured text rather than a designed PDF is the difference between a site that stays true and one that quietly goes stale.

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.

From interest to a booked table

This template has no basket, and that is right: a room like this does not sell dishes online, it sells seats. Everything routes to the reservation, where the form offers only the sittings your service hours define.

Dietary requirements and occasion are collected at the point of booking rather than on arrival, and both travel with the reservation into your TableSpark inbox. The guest gets a confirmation in your own branding immediately.

The pages guests read before they come

The story page is built for a chef with a philosophy: a long narrative, a pull quote, an interview, a sourcing block for the forests and farms, and a timeline. The gallery page carries the seasonal photography that a kitchen like this produces constantly.

Send a photograph, get a structured menu

The worst job in setting up a restaurant site is typing the menu. You do not have to. Send in the menu you hand to guests — card, board, PDF, ten pages if it runs that long. What returns is not a scan but a structured menu: every section, every dish, every price, with dietary and spice marks read off the page where they were printed. Nothing saves until you have looked at it — every field is editable on the review screen.

And because it is data rather than a photograph, it can do work. That single menu is what powers the menu 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.

Search titles and descriptions are drafted the same way: press Write with AI and it writes from the page in front of you. You still approve every line of it before it goes anywhere.

How long this actually takes

The waiting is the part that has been removed. Consider it a fully fitted kitchen waiting for your knives. Ten minutes to live, and the booking form does not need setting up: it is already answering. The booking appears in your inbox; the guest gets a confirmation before they have put their phone down.

One Stripe connection turns the site into something that collects money: deposits on tables, payment on orders, paid direct. Our commission is 0% at every plan level. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments. That is the only deduction.

1. Pick YamabikoThe whole thing is duplicated into your account to edit.
   1 min
2. Change the name and the wordsClick a block, change the words, swap the picture.
   4 min
3. Upload your menuPhotograph the menu; review what the AI read back.
   3 min
4. PublishLive on your address, with reservations working.
   1 min
5. Connect StripeNow you can take deposits on tables — direct to your account.
   1 min

Moving it onto your own domain

Nobody prints someone else’s name on their menu, and a web address is no different. You start on a TableSpark address so you can publish today, and move the site onto your own domain whenever you are ready — the one on your menus, your napkins and your Google listing.

You do not touch a certificate or a redirect rule. TableSpark issues and renews the SSL, points the bare domain at your chosen host, and keeps the search signals consistent. If the domain is already yours, nothing needs buying; you are told precisely which DNS record to point where.

After the booking: an email that looks like you

Most guests will see this email more often than they see your home page. On booking, an email goes out on your behalf with everything the guest needs — when, how many, where, how to reach you, and a one-click way to give the table back. Reminder emails, deposit receipts and cancellation notices are cut from the same cloth.

And the email is yours to design, not ours. Six templates, your accent colour, your logo, a cover photograph, the header layout, a sign-off in your own voice, your links and your social accounts. Once your domain is connected the email leaves from your address as well, not a generic one.

Not a mock-up: the frame runs the actual guest-email renderer. Press a template or an accent and watch it change.

What is editable — which is nearly everything

• Yours from the first minute: the restaurant’s name, the copy on every page, the photography, the dishes and prices, the opening hours and address, and the theme itself.
• Kept for you: the load-bearing decisions: long-menu layout, mobile ordering behaviour, responsive stacking, and colour contrast that does not collapse when you change the palette.
• Never locked: restructure any page, delete sections outright, add new modules, and create or remove pages. None of it is locked.

Findable, not merely online

A live link proves the page exists. It does not prove Google can read it. Sites sit at a perfectly good address and never appear in search — because of a leftover noindex, canonicals that disagree, pages nothing links to, a menu trapped in a PDF, absent restaurant schema, or verification never finished. What follows is expensive: searches for your name, your dishes or your street send guests to marketplaces that take a cut of the booking you would have had for free.

None of it is left for you to assemble. Rankings and indexing are Google’s decision and no honest supplier promises either — but the configuration that makes them possible is done.

Questions before you start