Larkin & Vine
Larkin & Vine is a demonstration build, not a client site — the restaurant is invented. It exists to show what a restaurant website looks like when the menu is treated as data instead of a design file. Most restaurant sites hang a PDF menu off a link: it cannot be read on a phone without pinching, cannot be crawled by Google, cannot say which dishes are gluten-free, and cannot be changed without whoever owns the original file. Here each dish is a post with a price field and dietary tags, so one edit updates the page and the structured data together. The opening hours work the same way — a single source of truth drives the hours table, the live "Open now" badge, the footer and the JSON-LD, so the site can never tell Google the kitchen is open while the page says closed. Reservation and private-dining requests are handled without a form plugin, stored in the admin as well as emailed, because a restaurant inbox on a Saturday is where booking requests go to die.
Larkin & Vine is a fictional restaurant — the address, phone number and reviews are invented, and the site is deliberately kept out of search results.
Key Capabilities
- Menu built from structured dish records — price, description and dietary tags per item, no PDF anywhere on the site
- Restaurant + Menu JSON-LD generated from the live content, so the structured data cannot drift from the menu being served
- Opening hours defined once and reused by the hours table, the live open/closed badge, the footer and the schema
- Reservation and private-dining request forms with nonce verification, honeypot and rate limiting — no form plugin
- Events that remove themselves from the site once the date has passed
- Sticky mobile action bar for the three things a phone visitor actually does: call, get directions, reserve
- Zero accessibility violations under axe-core (WCAG 2.1 AA) across every page
- No jQuery, no page builder, no third-party requests — 7 requests and a 124ms LCP on the home page
Built With
Why It Matters
Restaurants get sold websites that look fine and then quietly cost them business: a PDF menu Google cannot read, hours that contradict the search result, and a booking form nobody can update. This build is the argument for doing it properly — and it is the same theme a real Buffalo restaurant build would start from.