A restaurant website in Florence: small room, fast booking

A restaurant site in Florence has to close a booking quickly, because the room is small and every table counts. An English menu, today's hours and a three-field form do more work than ten photos of the façade: someone looking for dinner tonight decides in seconds.

The local fact is population: 360,930 residents in 2023, read from Wikidata on 1 November 2026, in the Città metropolitana di Firenze, Toscana. That is the municipal figure: the venue's real audience also includes people arriving from elsewhere, and that changes which languages go online.

Few covers change the design

With twenty tables the service fills fast and a form that answers two days later is useless. Booking belongs above the fold, with phone and WhatsApp next to it, and confirmation must arrive at once. When the room is full the page offers a waiting list or another time instead of an error: whoever is reading is already looking for an alternative.

The pages, in order of importance

Menu in HTML, English included

Regulation EU 1169/2011 requires allergen information to be available before the order is placed: the fourteen entries of Annex II belong in the menu, on a per-dish card or in a crossed table. Write the menu in HTML, one line per dish, price alongside, last-updated date at the bottom. The English version repeats the same dishes and the same prices: a summary with three dishes tells the visitor the rest is a mystery.

Booking: what to ask and what to skip

Photos: light first, handsome second

A 4 MB photo per dish burns the data plan of someone on 4G outside your door and shifts the layout. Declare width and height, use AVIF or WebP, lazy-load below the first screen and crop consistently at 4:3 or 16:9. The test is the browser Network tab: if the menu page goes past 2 MB, the prices go unread. The mechanism is explained in images without dimensions and layout shift.

Costs are national, not Florentine

A six or seven page site for a single venue sits in the low thousands of euro with copy, photos and menu ready; a photo shoot and translation raise the bill. Those are national ranges, published as such: our dataset holds no per-city prices, and a «Florence» figure would be an estimate with no source. The line that gets missed is menu maintenance, which changes with the seasons.

Three catalogue records

Gallery 01 from Shadcn Space is the grid for dining-room photos, with the publisher's licence to check on the block. Table 01 from ephraimduncan carries the dish-price-allergen table. The contact category holds 33 blocks and is the base for the booking form. Previews are free, the full code sits in the Pro plan.

The limitation to state up front

The catalogue holds React and Tailwind components: no booking engine, no table management, no integration with Google Reserve. The blocks cover the interface, availability arrives from an external service. On WordPress they do not install as they are: they work as a reference for structure and visual hierarchy.

# il menu è in HTML e leggibile senza JavaScript?
curl -s https://www.esempio.it/menu | grep -c "<li"

# peso della pagina menu e tempo di risposta
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{size_download} byte %{time_total}s\n" https://www.esempio.it/menu

# la versione inglese esiste con URL separato?
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://www.esempio.it/en/menu

The full guide is a restaurant website, costs item by item in what a website costs. If the venue does not show on Maps, the site alone brings no tables: you also need to get the site indexed by Google, and the menu blocks already counted are in the best menu blocks.