Eating into Restaurant & Recipe Web Design: 50+ Mouth Watering Websites
The food industry is one of the largest categories of business in the world. While taste is generally the main focus, design & appearance are just as important when it comes to showcasing products, restaurants and recipe websites. There are also an abundance of food bloggers or “foodies” in cyberspace that provide a wide variety of delicious recipes and beautiful photographs of the food.
Here are over 50 examples of successful food focused website designs by category & the trends seen within each.
Restaurants & Stores
Unique Personality
In the examples below, there is one trend that stands out; personality. Each of these stores and restaurants are entirely different. They may have a completely different atmosphere from fun and family friendly, to elegant and professional. As seen in the Guy Savoy website, you’ll see the simplicity and subtleties of the food displayed when you hover over portions of the site. Elegance is often portrayed in a simple manner without overwhelming the viewer and leaves room for imagination.
The introduction video is another great example of providing your viewer a "taste" of what your business has to offer. It shows all the fresh ingredients that go into the meals, and encourage you to visit the restaurant for the end result and to experience Guy Savoy’s ambiance.
Photography Focus
The type or category of food often shows in the graphics as well. In the French Meadow Bakery website, you’ll see the use of natural, subdued colors. The products are healthy and organic as such the designer chose colors that are naturally occurring. They also do a great job of portraying the high quality of their products. The graphical elements used to do this are adequate white space, a clean and neutral background and limiting the number of different fonts used on the site. These elements allow the product and photography to take center stage, providing a high-quality atmosphere.
Online Reservations
Square One Bistro and Chez Gérard offer online reservations on their websites. A great way to cut back on the amount of calls received in the afternoon and a way to attract customers to your website for easy reservations.
More Examples of Restaurant & Store Websites
Fast Food Restaurants
Printable Coupons
KFC does an excellent job of highlighting their printable coupons giving their customers another reason to visit their website and their restaurants. This is a great way to attract repeat visitors and compete with other fast food joints.
Catering
Qdoba and The Villager offer catering and highlights why and how their customers can go about having an event catered. They make it easy to plan a meal online without even having to make a phone call.
Order Online
Can’t leave the office for too long a period of time? Need to put in an order for your whole department and have trouble keeping track of everyone’s orders? Chipotle offers online ordering with ease which is a great asset for any fast food restaurant website.
More Examples of Fast Food Websites
Restaurant IPhone Apps
The one downside to including interactive and flash in a restaurant’s website is that it can be incredibly difficult to view on a mobile device. App developers for Apple’s iPhone have come up with many apps that help solve the problem of viewing restaurant websites on a small screen. Instead, you are able to view the essential elements, such as contact information, location, menus and customer reviews directly on your phone.
Here are some examples:
Enter your meal on this app and track calories and view nutritional information from a wide variety of restaurants.
Local Eats
is the perfect app if you’re looking for unique restaurants that are neither a franchise nor a chain. It’s also a great app for those who love to travel and like to try new things.
The Dinner Spinner from Allrecipes is great for those looking for recipe ideas on the fly.
Foodie Sites and Blogs
Step-by-Step Photography & Simplification
In a few of the examples shown here, there is a focus on step-by-step photography. There are many food lovers with a talent for photography. Mentioned earlier, food based designs are often driven by beautiful, flawless photography. To achieve a focus on photography, the design elements are limited and simplified. Most of the colors are found in the photography, rather than the graphics. Each of the websites below has a white background and utilizes white space beautifully. If the background was anything but white, the photography would lose its punch.
It’s difficult to design with a "less-is-more" attitude, but it is a successful method when featuring food & recipes.
Food Products
Solve Problems
When viewing these examples, you should have one question in your mind: “How can this product improve my life?” All of these designs are centered on the product and the problem it can solve for its consumers. The difference you’ll see when compared with the foodie website designs is that the photography isn’t the only focus. Marketing the product takes center stage over the photography.
If you take a look at the Stouffer, it focuses on families and how their product is comparable to a home-cooked meal, as lasagna and macaroni are often easy to make in large quantities. Th keyword is easy here. Every element on the website is focused on making meals easier for families. The article search is very intuitive to use and the options are targeting on the ways they can make their customer’s life easier. These types of retailers can’t give their customers an experience like a physical store or restaurant can. Granted their online experience can be fantastic, but it is still different from getting a real-life experience.
Horizontal Navigation
Another trend seen in food product websites is the navigation. A horizontal-styled navigation system is used by nearly all of these examples with a search field in the upper right-hand corner.
Flash Slideshows
Flash slideshows with fading transitions are often used in food product web designs to optimize the hero space. In a few of these examples, we see a focus on different key elements within each of these slides. Those that are food specific are the showcasing of detailed ingredients, how the products fit into current events (IE: Super Bowl parties, family dinners etc.) and recipes you can make with the product.
Games & Entertainment
Popsicle’s website is inviting for both children and adults. In the featured example below, they engage with children, their primary target market, by including fun games, similar to what they do with their packaging. Including games, free downloads (screen savers, desktops) and message boards are wonderful ways to interact with customers and keep them engaged and encourage them to come back.
More Great Examples of Product Website Designs
Recipe Websites
Organization
Organization is the key when designing a successful recipe website. Looking at Cooking Light’s website, there is an incredible amount of information organized beautifully and logically. The navigation system (both the main navigation & the footer) offers different categories, ways to search for recipes and even incorporates the current holidays and events that one might be cooking for.
Beautiful Photography
Photography is very important when viewers are trying out the recipes. It’s good to have an end result in mind when taking on a new recipe.
Product Coupons
One thing I really enjoyed was the incorporation of grocery coupons on a right-hand side bar of Cooking Light’s website (viewable on a single recipe page). This is a great way for advertisers to promote their products while adding value to the website.
Searching
These sites also tend to use bright colors to help guide the user. In the My Recipes example, they put a big emphasis on their search bar by using orange to highlight the search button. It is also placed directly above the hero image centered on the page to bring even more attention to it.
Printable Recipe Cards
My Recipes, like many other recipe websites, is very user friendly when it comes to printing out the recipes for later use. You have the ability to automatically print recipe cards in the size of your choosing.
More Examples of Recipe Websites
Eating Time!
What foods make your mouth water? Do you design for clients in the food industry? If so, what are trends you’ve seen on the web? Feel free to share your knowledge and expertise with all of us!
Some of them have reeeeally nice design :). Great, thanks.
Glad you like the selection. My hope was to give you as large a range as possible of excellent food website designs. Thanks for reading!
Wow, these websites make me feel hungry just by looking at them...
Great examples and analysis, Sarah.
You have a wonderful feel for design and experience.
I like Culinaria's site the most. Big pictures of the food.
Great job.
Thank you Dayne! Glad you enjoyed the post. I wish I lived near half of these restaurants so I could see if their food is actually as good as it looks! That must mean they did a great job enticing us!
Great list and screens! I love the home page designs for 4th Street Cookie and Café Yumm! Now I need to go make cookies :)
The 4th Street Cookie looks very yummy! You've got that right :)
Sarah,
Thanks for featuring me! Great list overall - love the other sites.
Paula
You deserve it Paula :)
Wow, great showcase, Sarah! You did well in analytical about the food industry. Well done!
Thank you Lam! I'm glad you found it useful!
It's good to see so many great restaurant website designs when so many out there are horrible, flash-based inaccessible messes. Some of these are really stunning!
Beautiful roundup, thanks for posting :D
Great Websites - this is a nice r-t site too http://www.pegasuschicago.com/
Look at these ones too, they are very nice !
http://www.ricardocuisine.com/
http://aladistasio.telequebec.tv/
@Dimo, @Philippe thanks for adding some more great sites!
Wow! I'm just looking for a article like this :) Fantastic
A great collection! I like the variety of styles and approaches.
Codesquid - I disagree with you, flash websites can be cool and friendly and the fwa proves that :)
You both make great points when mentioning Flash sites. I think they can be a great asset to have on particular sites, but when using a mobile device in a new city to find a restaurant, it can make it inaccessible if the site is built with flash. So depending on if that element is important or not to the restaurant, it is a downfall of flash for sure. Although I would say most people would probably only be looking for an address & menu, so if those elements are html based then it could still be successful. Just needs to be planned out beforehand to cover those things.
Most probably CSS3 and HTML5 is the solution.
This is a great list of sites! The colors, layouts, and photography are amazing. This is great timing because a friend of mine just lost his job and wants to pursue being a chef and catering. These sites will definately come in handy for putting him a great website together.
Check out 2 websites I designed for restaurants:
http://www.leursehof.nl
http://www.verlangenwijchen.nl
Thanks!
Sarah, what is the best CMS to use for restaurant or recipe websites?
Paul, I think that question depends on what the site is offering and what the preference of the client and designer is. If the client is more computer savy I think you would be able to use a more complex CMS if necessary. But even a WordPress CMS could suffice if the site is simply showcasing menus, photos and location information. I would personally shy away from Flash based sites for this industry.
Thanks. I'm actually thinking if Magneto or those ecommerce CMS could actually use to scale for such industry. What do you think?
Magento is a great e-commerce platform. Checkout this site that one of my client's utilize on Magento: http://www.northbaytrading.com. I'm also currently working with a programmer on another Magento project in a different industry over in Singapore.
I wouldn't say it is necessary to go to those lengths unless you're actually planning on selling something on the site. Magento is specifically setup to handle full-blown store fronts online.
Hey Sarah, Thanks for the info. Magento is quite scalable I presume too.
Ahh these are making me hungry. Really nice post.
Restaurant website images are not loading. Please check and let me know so I can come back and read this.
Hi Brian,
Which link are not loading? Can you give us the title of the image specifically?
http://net.onextrapixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/jamiesitalian.jpg
http://net.onextrapixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/nibbledish.jpg
http://net.onextrapixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/allrecipes.jpg
Looks like net.onextrapixel.com might not be working properly.
Sorry to hear your having trouble! I hope this gets fixed so you can read the post!
Images are loading now.
Glad to hear that. Thanks!
Very beautiful collection, thanks for sharing.
I love "vintage/retro'" influence, such as "bakerella" site.
Now i'm hungry ;)
Hello
These are truly mouth watering web sites for us and I will definitely check all these one by one in my free time.I like your collection and I do appreciate for that.Thank you very much for giving this to us.
Very nice collection, makes me want to raid the fridge.
Good collection. The first impression should deliver an emotional connection, giving a *feeling* about what's distinctive about your offering.
Branding and imagery are important for first impression, and there should also be strong calls to action to encourage visitors to take the next step.