When visiting a restaurant website, people often want to look at the menus, and this is a great place to let your creativity really shine. We’ve looked around the internet to find ten great restaurant websites that have produced amazing and interactive menus.
Ruby Tuesday
Like many restaurants, Ruby Tuesday has separate menus for different times of the day. To deal with this large amount of information they have used an elegant tab system. Click on your required menu – brunch or dinner, for example, and the menu will drop down, keeping all extraneous information hidden away. Special meals are showed off on a content slider with stunning food photography.
Benito’s Hat
Benito’s Hat is a UK-based Mexican restaurant where diners choose their meal in stages, building it to their own specifications. They choose their base, then their fillings, toppings and their sides. The restaurant website incorporates this four stage process into the menu, encouraging visitors to click on sub-menus to move through each stage.
Giraffe
Like Ruby Tuesday, Giraffe has different menus across the day. Rather than using a dropdown, Giraffe has links to its menus in content boxes on the front page. Visitors can click through to the time of day they are interested in, or they have the option to view everything at once.
Backyard Burgers
The focus of Backyard Burgers’ website is, unsurprisingly, the burgers. Upon landing there is a huge slider with a burger on it. Visitors are encouraged to slide across the restaurant’s burgers. Upon clicking on the full menu the visitor can choose what they want to view from the left hand menu, or browse through the “related items.”
L’Auberge de l’ill
The L’Auberge de l’ill website is, like the restaurant, classy. The Flash website is a great balance between style and content – showing off the food photography while still enabling the visitor to browse through the menu.
Cantilever
The Cantilever website looks like a standard website – with the content contained on a number of different pages. However, upon clicking upon a menu item the website simply scrolls down smoothly to another section of the same page with its own header. It’s an interesting approach to website construction and works particularly well on a page like this with not too much content.
Mellow Mushroom
Mellow Mushroom is another Flash website with great interactivity. Rolling over various elements on the page causes them to be highlighted. There are some cute animations across the website, and the menu is easy to navigate with useful information.
This is Leaf
This is Leaf is a large tea shop with extensive tea menus. The website uses a vertical column layout with the menu on the left hand side, content menus on the next column and information changing in the middle. The menus are split up into different times of the day, making it easy to browse.
Wokitokee
If you want to see the height of cuteness in website design, Wokitokee has it. The website utilizes the best of Flash, with bold colors and website interactions on mouse rollovers. It’s also got some great sound effects which are used judiciously.
Leon
Like many of the restaurants in our showcase, Leon has different menus for different times of the day. To support this, the website has taken a slightly different approach. All of the menu content is on one page and clicking on the navigation menu will take you to the correct time of day. The nav menu, however, doesn’t scroll off the page but remains fixed while the rest of the content moves. This lets you find your way around wherever you are on the page.
