7 ms·

Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

297 points by jillsy 15y ago

ZoFreX 15y ago
As someone who has built a fair few restaurant sites, there are lots of reasons. If a web design agency builds a site that doesn't work on the iPhone or iPad, which are both now considered critical to restaurant marketing, they get to charge extra for creating an iOS specific version, or an app, or whatever. If you create one site that works great on everything, you make less money. Restaurants are also sometimes run dreadfully. There's a particular type of chef that just cannot delegate, cannot let go of the details. Some of the biggest names are barely breaking even - in recent news the "best restaurant in the world" shut down, having never made a profit! Then there's communication: People running restaurants are often all over the country, hard to get hold of, it's quite difficult to get decisions made. On splash screens etc: If the client wants it, they want it. You can try to talk them out of it but at the end of the day if they insist, you gotta build it, and sometimes what they ask for just isn't easily possible without flash (sorry!) It's a bit unfair to pick on restaurants, to be honest. Pick a random, non-chain business off your high street. How good is their website? How many of them use flash? A lot of low-end websites are still in that quagmire, but the meat of it is that you don't need to visit the website for most of these businesses but for restaurants the web has become critical, so you notice it more. Lastly, to anyone out there that does make restaurant websites: Push back. Try to explain to your clients why it's not such a great idea to use flash, or intro screens. Try to explain the use-cases etc, and above all show them there is a very good business case for having a good website. My current employer actually specialises in restaurant websites and I'm really, genuinely proud of what we're doing - and our clients love it too. It takes effort and it's risky, but helping your client have the best website possible can pay off. Edit: Between this article and the recent attack from Cracked, I'm feeling a little under siege, especially as both were fairly light on actual facts. An issue that came up in both: > This is because restaurants often don't have tools to update the text on their sites—saving and replacing a PDF file of a menu is easier than messing with the code on the site This is a horrible simplification. In many cases the PDF menu is produced by a design agency, which is certainly a lot more effort than updating text on a website. It's also not hard to code either a PDF uploader or a page text editor or both, but you'll find plenty pick the PDF uploader. If you spent that sort of money on a PDF, you'd want to upload it too! And of course the menus are often very designed and they want that control (which the article does cover on other points) My question on this issue is: Is a PDF download really so bad? It's not something I personally find particularly intrusive and for a restaurant menu it seems suitable enough.
- encoderer 15y ago
  Another reason certainly is a lack of resources (cash) to commit to the project. Sure, an established, profitable restaurant should have no trouble funding a modest, tidy, professionally built site. But the truth is, most restaurants youre visiting aren't "established" and "profitable."
  - ZoFreX 15y ago
    This is absolutely true and in the current climate not many small businesses (which is really what restaurants fall under, whether they are a tiny mom & pop or internationally renowned they are not typically very large organisations) can spare the cash to make a truly awesome website.
  - romansanchez 15y ago
    Wouldn't you agree that building a Flash site is harder, more expensive than a simple HTML/CSS site?
    - ZoFreX 15y ago
      Absolutely not. You need a designer to design and build the entire thing in one application for the former, and someone to build the PSD, then slice it, write the HTML and CSS... Flash is a much faster workflow, and it's a workflow that more people are good enough at to make a passable website.
  - jdminhbg 15y ago
    The restaurant website topic comes up frequently, and this is a frequent response. But there are two reasons it's clearly wrong: 1) Restaurants could jam their hours and menu onto a free theme for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity and be vastly more usable, yet do the latter anyway. 2) There are lots of cash-strapped small businesses around that don't have as uniformly unusable websites as restaurants. The issue is not money.
    - HSO 15y ago
pbreit 15y ago
While I agree that restaurant sites in particular are quite lousy, Fleur de Lys did not strike me as a good example. Hubert Keller is a genuine personality and aspiring DJ. The restaurant is small, has no trouble staying full, the menu changes frequently and wants to surprise diners anyway. But I'll reiterate, even thought the point has already been made a million times: not providing a web site that can be viewed on an iOS device is criminally insane, particularly for restaurants which frequently would be accessed by mobile devices.
- telemachos 15y ago
  > While I agree that restaurant sites in particular are quite lousy, Fleur de Lys did not strike me as a good example. Hubert Keller is a genuine personality and aspiring DJ. The restaurant is small, has no trouble staying full, the menu changes frequently and wants to surprise diners anyway. I think Hubert Keller is a genius as a chef, but I have no idea what the connection is between the last two sentences and the first two. He's cool; the restaurant is successful and good. What does that have to do with the website, which is truly god-awful. Here's what I see when I open it in Safari on OSX Lion (stock - Flash is not installed): http://cl.ly/9AsG http://cl.ly/9AsG. If anything, an interesting chef at a good restaurant - with a website this awful is the best example. It shows that even (otherwise) smart people and successful restaurants fall into this trap. While I'm here, a favorite post on this theme: http://venomousporridge.com/post/389785000/a-conversation-i-have-every-month-or-so[1] http://venomousporridge.com/post/389785000/a-conversation-i-... [1] HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130419 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130419
jrockway 15y ago
Restaurants have websites? I just use Google Places or Yelp. Not only do I get the hours of operation, a rough idea of the price, and a phone number without even clicking, I also get reviews. Who would even think to look for a restaurant's own page?
- kalid 15y ago
  Restaurant websites often have menus and photos (of course, sometimes impossible to get to when using your phone).
- tibbon 15y ago
  One problem here is that these things often change and no one on Yelp will notice in a smaller community. Maybe they aren't open Monday anymore. Maybe they moved.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    That's what the phone number is for. Nobody remembers to update their own websites either.
- ZoFreX 15y ago
  Please bear in mind that places is pretty easy to stand out on, currently. The restaurants you are seeing are the ones that have hired (good) SEO people. A little bit of effort currently goes a LONG way on places (in the UK at least), so by looking for restaurants this way you'll still only be seeing a subset of them.
commenter 15y ago
what about this one? www.parlapizza.com.br
6ren 15y ago
Counterpoint: do restaurant customers (i.e. ordinary people) also think these websites are awful? When I see a website like that, I just think "it's not targeting me". Also, I've actually given up on all websites of non-internet companies, including big retailers. It's just too tedious to find information, too slow loading. Their mobile sites often load quicker. but have even less info. You're better off ringing them. (BTW: the kind of info I'm talking about is like opening hours - and often when they do post that info... it's wrong Yes. It is actually worse than useless).
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  "Counterpoint: do restaurant customers (i.e. ordinary people) also think these websites are awful?" I notice that regular customers mostly use Yelp, OpenTable or just plain Google to look up a restaurant's phone number or location. That suggests to me that they've learned that going to the actual web site is usually a bad bet.
- brudgers 15y ago
  I think restaurant customers find restaurant websites, largely irrelevant. Who the hell picks a restaurant by conducting a websearch to compare features as if entrees were laptops? I'm sure someone does, but most people pick a restaurant because they have been there and know what they are in for, or because someone they know has been there and recommended it.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    Actually I know quite a few people who do that, myself included. Sure, past experience and advice from friends plays a big part, but even then I'll google for the menu in advance, pretty much just to get a feel for the place. Also, if you or anyone you know is the slightest bit fussy when it comes to food, it's worth knowing in advance. For example I love pretentious restaurants where what the food looks like on the plate is important. My dad, on the other hand, doesn't - he wants basic food that tastes good, and plenty of it (admitedly I enjoy that too..), not original creations in small portions. He wants chips, not dauphinoise potatoes. My sister on the other hand doesn't care about the type of cooking, but is very fussy on what she wants to eat in a restaurant. There are literally a few dishes she wants to eat, most of which are likely to be found in grill restaurants, pub restaurants, etc. So, whenever I'm eating with either of them, it's good to be able to look up the type of food available. edit: Oh, and another case - when you need a restaurant and neither you nor people you know have any experience to base your choice on. What harm is there in taking a look at menus and trying to guess which you will like more. Maybe you'll still pick a bad one, but at least you tried not to.
mashmac2 15y ago
Another example not in the article: http://thecheesecakefactory.com http://thecheesecakefactory.com
- ericras 15y ago
  I'm shocked by this one. I used to try to make sites like this - websites that mimic real-life interaction a la Microsoft Bob - around 10 years ago. Although it's an instance of dated web concepts AND it features the dreaded 10 second Flash load wait time, it is an impressive achievement. If only in a "Winchester House" kind of way.
- bryne 15y ago
  Holy crap, The Cheesecake Factory's website is a 1996-era graphic adventure game!
- onewland 15y ago
  It kind of highlights the inefficiency of the site, but it has a resource-ful URL structure: http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu/Side+Dishes/fresh_broccoli http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu/Side+Dishes/fresh_b...
wallflower 15y ago
Shake Shack (http://shakeshack.com http://shakeshack.com on mobile device or http://shakeshack.com/mobile/ http://shakeshack.com/mobile/) is an example of a beautifully designed, minimal, useful mobile web site. Mobile websites are more than putting a mobile template on. Contrast Shake Shack with Walmart's http://walmart.com http://walmart.com (on a mobile device) > However, the design firm pitches to the owner, not to the customers. And thus the website is designed to please them, rather than actually being useful for potential customers. > Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)? Yes and no. Once a restaurant has committed to a particular POS, it is very, very, very hard to get them away from it. First, it cost them -- at a safe ballpark estimate -- $10,000 to install it in the first place, so they're going to milk it for as long as they can before paying for anything else, even if it costs them more money that way in the long run. Second, change is really scary for these folks, because if they're trying a new POS, and it crashes on its first evening, they're going to have a lot of pissed off customers and that translates directly to empty seats. It doesn't help that every single system that they've tried -- or that their buddies in the industry have tried -- have been buggy, problematic, and prone to crankiness. It doesn't matter if you know that you're selling the best system in the world at the cheapest price; the owners are still going to be really gun-shy about converting. For a credible, sexy Open Table competitor: check out http://averoinc.com http://averoinc.com Note: Some comments taken out of context from the threads linked below. I linked to these threads because they contain some good previous discussions about the restaurant industry and their systems. OpenTable is a reservation system (as refulgentis has pointed out). These comments taken out of context from previous related discussions on News.YC: "The hell that is a restaurant website" http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1130419 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1130419 "Is OpenTable worth it?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904689 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904689 "Why are restaurant websites so bad?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044259 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044259
- refulgentis 15y ago
  As a restaurant point of sale developer myself (Ambur, an iOS app), one thing: OpenTable isn't a POS, it's a reservation system. I didn't see the conflation between sites and POS systems in the article, but I see it throughout your comment. Everything else rings true. We have to invest a lot of time into each prospect because they're used to buggy systems that have feature overload and as a result are hard to use and impossible to setup. We're selling at a ridiculously low price ($999 for unlimited device licensing as a single site), and we're doing well, but the time investment into each prospect is very high.
starwed 15y ago
>The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. I noticed medium sized bands tended to have the same godawful outdated website style, especially European metal bands. No idea if it is still like that -- I just started avoiding any such "official" pages.
- lytfyre 15y ago
  professional (especially wedding) photographers are also common culprits.
  - MaxGabriel 15y ago
    Yes there seem to be fields where this problem is just rampant. Liquor websites are the worst of any I've seen (milagro, 1800, avion, grey goose, appleton, smirnoff, etc). Some are pretty good: Bacardi offers an HTML version, St. Germain is largely non-flash, Jose Cuervo (while really slow for whatever the reason) is non-flash. With liquor I always thought that it was that 1) some brands have trouble differentiating themselves 2) the desire to create a 'culture' around their beverage--and that seems to fit the OP's description of the restaurant industry
    - artursapek 15y ago
      Liquor companies' ads and websites are like those of car companies. I think it's because there's so little to say about such obvious products. Vodka is pretty much legally required to all be the same.
  - jamesteow 15y ago
    Some professional photographers say they use Flash because they want to protect their images from being stolen... despite the fact that you can screencap them?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
kirillzubovsky 15y ago
It's kind of true. I tried selling software to restaurants (http://Tablely.com http://Tablely.com) with some friends, and another Seattle company (http://OrderSm.com http://OrderSm.com) is still trying, but working with the owners is terrible. They are too busy dealing with their day-to-day crap and technology is really not on their mind. It's sad, but it's true.
clistctrl 15y ago
The music on this pubs site convinced me to go. http://www.thirstyscholarpub.com/home.htm http://www.thirstyscholarpub.com/home.htm
callmeed 15y ago
My next startup is targeting this problem. I'm pitching it as "About.me for restaurants" ... a single-page, instant setup site that has location/hours/menu/contact info. I'm planning on posting it to HN for review in a few days. If anyone wants a peak now, drop me an email.
- thesethings 15y ago
  This sounds like such a great idea. I travel in two circles that would love to check this out. Please do post it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Don't pitch it as "about.me for restaurants". I had no idea what about.me is and I'm in the startup community, read HN, TechCrunch, etc... The people you're selling to will have no idea what you're talking about. What about "Facebook for restaurants"?
  - jamesteow 15y ago
    "Facebook for restaurants" is like another social network. I know what about.me is, and if he pitched it to me, I would think, "a one page website for restaurants."
  - callmeed 15y ago
    I only use that analogy for startup folks and investors. Facebook definitely doesn't fit. And, for the record, Tech Crunch has mentioned about.me tons of times: http://techcrunch.com/search/about.me http://techcrunch.com/search/about.me
- fourspace 15y ago
  Looking forward to it. Interested to see how you solve the problem of menu editing.
- chunkyslink 15y ago
nowarninglabel 15y ago
While I agree with some of the analysis, I'm not sure I can agree with all of it without some perspective from the customers. The author makes it quite obvious they would not pay for a $72 or $400 meal. However, what do the people who would pay those prices think of the site? Perhaps, they don't want to be reminded of the price on the website, but rather of the good experience.
mikebracco 15y ago
I live and work in Santa Monica and two horrific ones are Santa Monica food staples: Bay Cities: http://www.baycitiesitaliandeli.com/ http://www.baycitiesitaliandeli.com/ Swingers: http://www.swingersdiner.com/ http://www.swingersdiner.com/
minikomi 15y ago
Recently recommended cargo collective to a friend who just opened a restaurant... He still insisted on using images in place of text in some cases, but I think it turned out pretty good and its easy for him to update http://higetaka.jp http://higetaka.jp
tomkarlo 15y ago
Fashion web sites, including the sites for the large brands, are just as bad as restaurant web sites. Which is even more embarrassing for an industry that's so inherently visual. Even fairly successful fashion labels will have terrible, flash-based sites with autoplay music and (often) out-of-date content, because it's too expensive or too much trouble to update the site (which probably was built lacking any kind of real back-end CMS.)
- jamesteow 15y ago
  Actually, they are making changes. createthe has been transforming some high end brands towards HTML5. Thing about fashion is that it's more about brand than usability. They get a lot of their sales from their boutiques, net-a-porter, or other 3rd parties.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    I wasn't thinking of the large multinational brands so much as the smaller labels that are more similar to the food trade.
artursapek 15y ago
Facebook or Google should think about a specialized type of "page" for restaurants that's easy to use and plugs in to everything that's good about the web.
chunkyslink 15y ago
>> Over the last few weeks I've spent countless hours, now lost forever, plumbing the depths of restaurant Web hell I'm sorry but the author of this article has obviously missed the following sites built by the UK based company Engage Interactive. These guys have nailed the UK market and make awesome restaurant websites for some of the biggest chains / names. www.strada.co.uk www.bellaitalia.co.uk www.caferouge.co.uk www.giraffe.net They feature exactly what you want, and they do it well. All of these sites make you want to eat in the Restuarants. They also do www.pocketdiner.co.uk which redirects mobile traffic to a mobile version of the sites. The culture at these restaurants is nothing like what is being described in the article. So all together I'm not sure where the author is coming from.
- ZoFreX 15y ago
  Pocket Diner is the wrong way, IMO, to go about things. It's not really that hard to make a single site that works well on all devices, this is exactly what I meant by spinning more money out of clients by selling them different versions for mobile.
- mannepanne 15y ago
  Thanks for noticing! My name is Magnus Hultberg, I work at Livebookings and collaborate with Engage around reservation services and Pocket Diner. The sites you list above are in my opinion really great examples of what restaurant websites could and should be. There are also other agencies in the UK delivering really well such as Ignite Hospitality and Evolving.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
The problem is that restaurant websites aren't seen as revenue makers, so they are merely vanity products and thus dominated by the whims of the restaurant owner, who (at the present time) likely has very little familiarity with web technologies, let alone web design. When websites become more appreciated as a source of revenue then they will be taken seriously enough to actually improve. The big problem today is that whereas it's easy to show someone a competing restaurant and see how popular it is, it's a lot more difficult to see the effectiveness of other restaurants' websites since all of that data is more or less invisible to anyone but the owner.
- mashmac2 15y ago
  So, the question is, how do we show the restaurant owners that having a better website will increase their revenue?
  - irrumator 15y ago
    Why are you so sure it will? Can you give me use cases or examples where a restaurant owner stands to make money from his site anywhere other than booking reservations possibly?
    - floppydisk 15y ago
      Couple off the top of my head: 1) If you have live acts performing at your establishment Friday-Sunday, the website can raise awareness. 2) Specialty products / menu items. 3) Paraphernalia / SWAG from the restaurant. 4) Take out -- order online, pick up in store. 5) If you sell things like coffee beans, web presence increases the number of eyeballs on your product. At the end of the day, restaurants are about putting bodies in chairs and serving them food. Thus, the focus of a good website should be increasing traffic into the restaurant. One way I could see functionality between restaurant and website would be linking time-to-wait dynamically with the website. So if I go to a restaurant's website, I could see # of people waiting and average time to wait for the evening. This does go back to putting bodies in seats, but it would better link web presence with what actually happens in the restaurant.
latch 15y ago
In hong kong, openrice.com is a huge website for restaurants...and it's a disaster...so much opportunity for someone to clean their clock.
tibbon 15y ago
I was talking to a local business owner who runs a new Takoyaki place in town. I mentioned he didn't have a website. We had a good conversation about it, and he was hoping to get one up but wasn't quite sure what he needed. He's a young guy a pretty savvy overall, having acquired around 4,000 Likes on Facebook and frequently updating it. I told him (and he seemed to agree) that he needed a simple website that was the following - No Flash, just HTML5/CSS. - No music/sound at all - No long story about the owner, style, etc. If I'm here, I'm likely already sold, just let me know how to get there. At most, a short line on what Takoyaki is, since many Americans in Ohio are unfamiliar with it. - One page only (SEO people will cringe, but its better than Flash likely and easier to maintain. - Basic information given upfront: Name, address, Google Maps widget, phone number, hours and their standard menu which consists of 5 items. Mention to check Facebook/Twitter for specials (thinking of maintainability). Making sure none of the items are done as photos, which is a favorite of auto repair and sales places for unknown reasons. - Very basic colors and formatting. Ugly? Yes. But if I'm on my iPhone and looking for dinner, I don't care. I just need the details. - Links to their Facebook and Twitter accounts (maybe widgets for each if he wants to get fancy). - Google Analytics for long term tracking - Maybe a photo of the front of the establishment, didn't need to be fancy, just something a person who looked online would recognize when they were looking for it. No photos of the owner, etc. I don't claim to be an expert here, but this is what I want to see when I visit a website. Again, some of these are technically bad for SEO, but that isn't the point. Functionality should always trump SEO in my opinion. I actually even offerred that I do this for him for some free Takoyaki, since literally it sounds like 20 minutes in Textmate and then just throwing a static page up. Might stop by later this week to confirm the details. I'd rather see a local business do it right than wrong.
- lancewiggs 15y ago
  What a great idea to do it for him, but perhaps use Wordpress.com so he can more easily edit the result.
- corin_ 15y ago
  There's a genius business plan - well, perhaps "business" plan is slightly over-selling it. Spend a little time creating some really nice restaurant websites for a small number of your favourite local places (ones with either no website or a terrible website), offer it for free, with free hosting, and free updates, in return for free meals. Get a few of those done, and spend a few days a week eating out for free, in the knowledge that you're helping friendly local businesses whose services you've always enjoyed.
badmonkey0001 15y ago
These words make me close tab for the site I'm looking at right away: "Click to launch site". I came to your website... shouldn't it have launched already? Oh it's not a website - it's a multimedia presentation? Great. That's not what I came to your "website" for. No thanks. (Though I have to admit, there was a time when I actively looked for those sites. I made some good money going to restaurants and other small businesses around town offering to convert their sites from un-editable flash to a simple, skin-able CMS I had whipped up. They were always skeptical until I said "never pay for changing text or prices on your site again". After that, they were my customer and no longer the customer of the wannabe-techno-hipster that sold them the original contract for site and "updates".)
vigilanteweb 15y ago
I know there are a couple companies out there that focus just on making restaurant websites. There is Aioli (http://aioliweb.com http://aioliweb.com) here in Seattle and I know that they do the site for James Beard Award winner Lark (http://larkseattle.com http://larkseattle.com).
robryan 15y ago
Really they would probably do better with something outputting xml/json and getting their items/ prices/ location/ operation hours on every local business site in existence.
hxf148 15y ago
Check out http://infostripe.com http://infostripe.com Giving flash heavy restaurant sites a mobile option for customers was one of the design objectives. We are making great progress in the local area restaurants, mostly because it's free but also it's easy for the owners to setup and manage themselves.
yarian 15y ago
Incidentally, I came upon this restaurant site. Now that is a restaurant site done right: http://www.porte-sainte-claire.com/#home http://www.porte-sainte-claire.com/#home
skrebbel 15y ago
I can't relate to this at all. Restaurants in my area have crappy sites, but none of them annoying in ways this article describes. They're just a bit old, or the text is too small, or the pictures are ugly. You know, the usual. Is this SF local news? If so, why is it on HN?
- Apple-Guy 15y ago
  Have you ever tried to access a site on the go using a smart phone?
Luyt 15y ago
"a series of menu buttons that aren't labeled; you've got to mouse over each one to find out what you're about to click on" This actually has a name: 'Mystery Meat Navigation'[1]. It's one of the most irritating usability ailments. I thought it was extinct by now, but apparently it's still used on restaurant sites. It used to be quite popular on art- and band-related sites, some ten years ago. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
robbie7 15y ago
We're going to make a CMS that focuses on the activities of local businesses. Our first focus is gonna be restaurants, cause indeed most of their website suck. So we're gonna give them the opportunity to be able to update their website via our CMS, their clients are gonna be able to order food online, order a table online (we still have to checkout opentable first tho, anyone know any other services like them?), the restaurant holder can easily edit their meu pages via a editor, upload images of their meals, divide the menu in appetisers etc, and ofcourse other pages like opening hours, contact page, album, ... What do you guys think about this? Other local companies we're gonna focus on are hotels, sportclubs, hairdresser, beautsaloon, garage, ...
- robflynn 15y ago
  I've been toying around with something similar in my spare time, though mine focuses only specifically on restaurants. I like the idea quite a bit, just haven't found the hours to dedicate to it just yet. Maybe after my product launch...
hootmon 15y ago
The author is too kind. Most proprietors of these things are 100% about food and service, and have no clue when it comes to tech. They tend to be very opinionated and tend to slough over anything outside of their core activity. They consider web sites just animated menus, and as such are suckers for sites as mini movies. Then tend to be action and not analysis oriented, so maybe after a few years of fail web sites, they will eventually stumble on what works instead of throwing money at pretentious wanna be movie makers.
noeltock 15y ago
I agree with a number of the comments, I setup a business selling websites to Restaurants (another user beat me to it in mentioning it ;) ) and have now transformed it into an SaaS ( http://www.theme-force.com http://www.theme-force.com ). You can sign up for it and play around with it for free ( open beta ). Feel free to provide any feedback/suggestions. Regarding the article; people have already touched on the main points, i.e. accessibility (html vs flash vs pdf) and content (essentials vs fluff), so there's not much to add here. However, I do feel Schema (something we've worked on a lot), will become more and more important. Cheers
joev 15y ago
Oblig: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website http://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website

297 points by jillsy 15y ago

As someone who has built a fair few restaurant sites, there are lots of reasons. If a web design agency builds a site that doesn't work on the iPhone or iPad, which are both now considered critical to restaurant marketing, they get to charge extra for creating an iOS specific version, or an app, or whatever. If you create one site that works great on everything, you make less money. Restaurants are also sometimes run dreadfully. There's a particular type of chef that just cannot delegate, cannot let go of the details. Some of the biggest names are barely breaking even - in recent news the "best restaurant in the world" shut down, having never made a profit! Then there's communication: People running restaurants are often all over the country, hard to get hold of, it's quite difficult to get decisions made. On splash screens etc: If the client wants it, they want it. You can try to talk them out of it but at the end of the day if they insist, you gotta build it, and sometimes what they ask for just isn't easily possible without flash (sorry!) It's a bit unfair to pick on restaurants, to be honest. Pick a random, non-chain business off your high street. How good is their website? How many of them use flash? A lot of low-end websites are still in that quagmire, but the meat of it is that you don't need to visit the website for most of these businesses but for restaurants the web has become critical, so you notice it more. Lastly, to anyone out there that does make restaurant websites: Push back. Try to explain to your clients why it's not such a great idea to use flash, or intro screens. Try to explain the use-cases etc, and above all show them there is a very good business case for having a good website. My current employer actually specialises in restaurant websites and I'm really, genuinely proud of what we're doing - and our clients love it too. It takes effort and it's risky, but helping your client have the best website possible can pay off. Edit: Between this article and the recent attack from Cracked, I'm feeling a little under siege, especially as both were fairly light on actual facts. An issue that came up in both: > This is because restaurants often don't have tools to update the text on their sites—saving and replacing a PDF file of a menu is easier than messing with the code on the site This is a horrible simplification. In many cases the PDF menu is produced by a design agency, which is certainly a lot more effort than updating text on a website. It's also not hard to code either a PDF uploader or a page text editor or both, but you'll find plenty pick the PDF uploader. If you spent that sort of money on a PDF, you'd want to upload it too! And of course the menus are often very designed and they want that control (which the article does cover on other points) My question on this issue is: Is a PDF download really so bad? It's not something I personally find particularly intrusive and for a restaurant menu it seems suitable enough.

encoderer 15y ago
Another reason certainly is a lack of resources (cash) to commit to the project. Sure, an established, profitable restaurant should have no trouble funding a modest, tidy, professionally built site. But the truth is, most restaurants youre visiting aren't "established" and "profitable."
- ZoFreX 15y ago
  This is absolutely true and in the current climate not many small businesses (which is really what restaurants fall under, whether they are a tiny mom & pop or internationally renowned they are not typically very large organisations) can spare the cash to make a truly awesome website.
- romansanchez 15y ago
  Wouldn't you agree that building a Flash site is harder, more expensive than a simple HTML/CSS site?
  - ZoFreX 15y ago
    Absolutely not. You need a designer to design and build the entire thing in one application for the former, and someone to build the PSD, then slice it, write the HTML and CSS... Flash is a much faster workflow, and it's a workflow that more people are good enough at to make a passable website.
- jdminhbg 15y ago
  The restaurant website topic comes up frequently, and this is a frequent response. But there are two reasons it's clearly wrong: 1) Restaurants could jam their hours and menu onto a free theme for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity and be vastly more usable, yet do the latter anyway. 2) There are lots of cash-strapped small businesses around that don't have as uniformly unusable websites as restaurants. The issue is not money.
  - HSO 15y ago

pbreit 15y ago

While I agree that restaurant sites in particular are quite lousy, Fleur de Lys did not strike me as a good example. Hubert Keller is a genuine personality and aspiring DJ. The restaurant is small, has no trouble staying full, the menu changes frequently and wants to surprise diners anyway. But I'll reiterate, even thought the point has already been made a million times: not providing a web site that can be viewed on an iOS device is criminally insane, particularly for restaurants which frequently would be accessed by mobile devices.

telemachos 15y ago
> While I agree that restaurant sites in particular are quite lousy, Fleur de Lys did not strike me as a good example. Hubert Keller is a genuine personality and aspiring DJ. The restaurant is small, has no trouble staying full, the menu changes frequently and wants to surprise diners anyway. I think Hubert Keller is a genius as a chef, but I have no idea what the connection is between the last two sentences and the first two. He's cool; the restaurant is successful and good. What does that have to do with the website, which is truly god-awful. Here's what I see when I open it in Safari on OSX Lion (stock - Flash is not installed): http://cl.ly/9AsG http://cl.ly/9AsG. If anything, an interesting chef at a good restaurant - with a website this awful is the best example. It shows that even (otherwise) smart people and successful restaurants fall into this trap. While I'm here, a favorite post on this theme: http://venomousporridge.com/post/389785000/a-conversation-i-have-every-month-or-so[1] http://venomousporridge.com/post/389785000/a-conversation-i-... [1] HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130419 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130419

jrockway 15y ago

Restaurants have websites? I just use Google Places or Yelp. Not only do I get the hours of operation, a rough idea of the price, and a phone number without even clicking, I also get reviews. Who would even think to look for a restaurant's own page?

kalid 15y ago
Restaurant websites often have menus and photos (of course, sometimes impossible to get to when using your phone).
tibbon 15y ago
One problem here is that these things often change and no one on Yelp will notice in a smaller community. Maybe they aren't open Monday anymore. Maybe they moved.
- jrockway 15y ago
  That's what the phone number is for. Nobody remembers to update their own websites either.
ZoFreX 15y ago
Please bear in mind that places is pretty easy to stand out on, currently. The restaurants you are seeing are the ones that have hired (good) SEO people. A little bit of effort currently goes a LONG way on places (in the UK at least), so by looking for restaurants this way you'll still only be seeing a subset of them.

commenter 15y ago

what about this one? www.parlapizza.com.br

6ren 15y ago

Counterpoint: do restaurant customers (i.e. ordinary people) also think these websites are awful? When I see a website like that, I just think "it's not targeting me". Also, I've actually given up on all websites of non-internet companies, including big retailers. It's just too tedious to find information, too slow loading. Their mobile sites often load quicker. but have even less info. You're better off ringing them. (BTW: the kind of info I'm talking about is like opening hours - and often when they do post that info... it's wrong Yes. It is actually worse than useless).

tomkarlo 15y ago
"Counterpoint: do restaurant customers (i.e. ordinary people) also think these websites are awful?" I notice that regular customers mostly use Yelp, OpenTable or just plain Google to look up a restaurant's phone number or location. That suggests to me that they've learned that going to the actual web site is usually a bad bet.
brudgers 15y ago
I think restaurant customers find restaurant websites, largely irrelevant. Who the hell picks a restaurant by conducting a websearch to compare features as if entrees were laptops? I'm sure someone does, but most people pick a restaurant because they have been there and know what they are in for, or because someone they know has been there and recommended it.
- corin_ 15y ago
  Actually I know quite a few people who do that, myself included. Sure, past experience and advice from friends plays a big part, but even then I'll google for the menu in advance, pretty much just to get a feel for the place. Also, if you or anyone you know is the slightest bit fussy when it comes to food, it's worth knowing in advance. For example I love pretentious restaurants where what the food looks like on the plate is important. My dad, on the other hand, doesn't - he wants basic food that tastes good, and plenty of it (admitedly I enjoy that too..), not original creations in small portions. He wants chips, not dauphinoise potatoes. My sister on the other hand doesn't care about the type of cooking, but is very fussy on what she wants to eat in a restaurant. There are literally a few dishes she wants to eat, most of which are likely to be found in grill restaurants, pub restaurants, etc. So, whenever I'm eating with either of them, it's good to be able to look up the type of food available. edit: Oh, and another case - when you need a restaurant and neither you nor people you know have any experience to base your choice on. What harm is there in taking a look at menus and trying to guess which you will like more. Maybe you'll still pick a bad one, but at least you tried not to.

mashmac2 15y ago

Another example not in the article: http://thecheesecakefactory.com http://thecheesecakefactory.com

ericras 15y ago
I'm shocked by this one. I used to try to make sites like this - websites that mimic real-life interaction a la Microsoft Bob - around 10 years ago. Although it's an instance of dated web concepts AND it features the dreaded 10 second Flash load wait time, it is an impressive achievement. If only in a "Winchester House" kind of way.
bryne 15y ago
Holy crap, The Cheesecake Factory's website is a 1996-era graphic adventure game!
onewland 15y ago
It kind of highlights the inefficiency of the site, but it has a resource-ful URL structure: http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu/Side+Dishes/fresh_broccoli http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu/Side+Dishes/fresh_b...

wallflower 15y ago

Shake Shack (http://shakeshack.com http://shakeshack.com on mobile device or http://shakeshack.com/mobile/ http://shakeshack.com/mobile/) is an example of a beautifully designed, minimal, useful mobile web site. Mobile websites are more than putting a mobile template on. Contrast Shake Shack with Walmart's http://walmart.com http://walmart.com (on a mobile device) > However, the design firm pitches to the owner, not to the customers. And thus the website is designed to please them, rather than actually being useful for potential customers. > Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)? Yes and no. Once a restaurant has committed to a particular POS, it is very, very, very hard to get them away from it. First, it cost them -- at a safe ballpark estimate -- $10,000 to install it in the first place, so they're going to milk it for as long as they can before paying for anything else, even if it costs them more money that way in the long run. Second, change is really scary for these folks, because if they're trying a new POS, and it crashes on its first evening, they're going to have a lot of pissed off customers and that translates directly to empty seats. It doesn't help that every single system that they've tried -- or that their buddies in the industry have tried -- have been buggy, problematic, and prone to crankiness. It doesn't matter if you know that you're selling the best system in the world at the cheapest price; the owners are still going to be really gun-shy about converting. For a credible, sexy Open Table competitor: check out http://averoinc.com http://averoinc.com Note: Some comments taken out of context from the threads linked below. I linked to these threads because they contain some good previous discussions about the restaurant industry and their systems. OpenTable is a reservation system (as refulgentis has pointed out). These comments taken out of context from previous related discussions on News.YC: "The hell that is a restaurant website" http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1130419 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1130419 "Is OpenTable worth it?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904689 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904689 "Why are restaurant websites so bad?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044259 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044259

refulgentis 15y ago
As a restaurant point of sale developer myself (Ambur, an iOS app), one thing: OpenTable isn't a POS, it's a reservation system. I didn't see the conflation between sites and POS systems in the article, but I see it throughout your comment. Everything else rings true. We have to invest a lot of time into each prospect because they're used to buggy systems that have feature overload and as a result are hard to use and impossible to setup. We're selling at a ridiculously low price ($999 for unlimited device licensing as a single site), and we're doing well, but the time investment into each prospect is very high.

starwed 15y ago

>The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. I noticed medium sized bands tended to have the same godawful outdated website style, especially European metal bands. No idea if it is still like that -- I just started avoiding any such "official" pages.

lytfyre 15y ago
professional (especially wedding) photographers are also common culprits.
- MaxGabriel 15y ago
  Yes there seem to be fields where this problem is just rampant. Liquor websites are the worst of any I've seen (milagro, 1800, avion, grey goose, appleton, smirnoff, etc). Some are pretty good: Bacardi offers an HTML version, St. Germain is largely non-flash, Jose Cuervo (while really slow for whatever the reason) is non-flash. With liquor I always thought that it was that 1) some brands have trouble differentiating themselves 2) the desire to create a 'culture' around their beverage--and that seems to fit the OP's description of the restaurant industry
  - artursapek 15y ago
    Liquor companies' ads and websites are like those of car companies. I think it's because there's so little to say about such obvious products. Vodka is pretty much legally required to all be the same.
- jamesteow 15y ago
  Some professional photographers say they use Flash because they want to protect their images from being stolen... despite the fact that you can screencap them?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

kirillzubovsky 15y ago

It's kind of true. I tried selling software to restaurants (http://Tablely.com http://Tablely.com) with some friends, and another Seattle company (http://OrderSm.com http://OrderSm.com) is still trying, but working with the owners is terrible. They are too busy dealing with their day-to-day crap and technology is really not on their mind. It's sad, but it's true.

clistctrl 15y ago

The music on this pubs site convinced me to go. http://www.thirstyscholarpub.com/home.htm http://www.thirstyscholarpub.com/home.htm

callmeed 15y ago

My next startup is targeting this problem. I'm pitching it as "About.me for restaurants" ... a single-page, instant setup site that has location/hours/menu/contact info. I'm planning on posting it to HN for review in a few days. If anyone wants a peak now, drop me an email.

thesethings 15y ago
This sounds like such a great idea. I travel in two circles that would love to check this out. Please do post it.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
kenjackson 15y ago
Don't pitch it as "about.me for restaurants". I had no idea what about.me is and I'm in the startup community, read HN, TechCrunch, etc... The people you're selling to will have no idea what you're talking about. What about "Facebook for restaurants"?
- jamesteow 15y ago
  "Facebook for restaurants" is like another social network. I know what about.me is, and if he pitched it to me, I would think, "a one page website for restaurants."
- callmeed 15y ago
  I only use that analogy for startup folks and investors. Facebook definitely doesn't fit. And, for the record, Tech Crunch has mentioned about.me tons of times: http://techcrunch.com/search/about.me http://techcrunch.com/search/about.me
fourspace 15y ago
Looking forward to it. Interested to see how you solve the problem of menu editing.
chunkyslink 15y ago

nowarninglabel 15y ago

While I agree with some of the analysis, I'm not sure I can agree with all of it without some perspective from the customers. The author makes it quite obvious they would not pay for a $72 or $400 meal. However, what do the people who would pay those prices think of the site? Perhaps, they don't want to be reminded of the price on the website, but rather of the good experience.

mikebracco 15y ago

I live and work in Santa Monica and two horrific ones are Santa Monica food staples: Bay Cities: http://www.baycitiesitaliandeli.com/ http://www.baycitiesitaliandeli.com/ Swingers: http://www.swingersdiner.com/ http://www.swingersdiner.com/

minikomi 15y ago

Recently recommended cargo collective to a friend who just opened a restaurant... He still insisted on using images in place of text in some cases, but I think it turned out pretty good and its easy for him to update http://higetaka.jp http://higetaka.jp

tomkarlo 15y ago

Fashion web sites, including the sites for the large brands, are just as bad as restaurant web sites. Which is even more embarrassing for an industry that's so inherently visual. Even fairly successful fashion labels will have terrible, flash-based sites with autoplay music and (often) out-of-date content, because it's too expensive or too much trouble to update the site (which probably was built lacking any kind of real back-end CMS.)

jamesteow 15y ago
Actually, they are making changes. createthe has been transforming some high end brands towards HTML5. Thing about fashion is that it's more about brand than usability. They get a lot of their sales from their boutiques, net-a-porter, or other 3rd parties.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  I wasn't thinking of the large multinational brands so much as the smaller labels that are more similar to the food trade.

artursapek 15y ago

Facebook or Google should think about a specialized type of "page" for restaurants that's easy to use and plugs in to everything that's good about the web.

chunkyslink 15y ago

>> Over the last few weeks I've spent countless hours, now lost forever, plumbing the depths of restaurant Web hell I'm sorry but the author of this article has obviously missed the following sites built by the UK based company Engage Interactive. These guys have nailed the UK market and make awesome restaurant websites for some of the biggest chains / names. www.strada.co.uk www.bellaitalia.co.uk www.caferouge.co.uk www.giraffe.net They feature exactly what you want, and they do it well. All of these sites make you want to eat in the Restuarants. They also do www.pocketdiner.co.uk which redirects mobile traffic to a mobile version of the sites. The culture at these restaurants is nothing like what is being described in the article. So all together I'm not sure where the author is coming from.

ZoFreX 15y ago
Pocket Diner is the wrong way, IMO, to go about things. It's not really that hard to make a single site that works well on all devices, this is exactly what I meant by spinning more money out of clients by selling them different versions for mobile.
mannepanne 15y ago
Thanks for noticing! My name is Magnus Hultberg, I work at Livebookings and collaborate with Engage around reservation services and Pocket Diner. The sites you list above are in my opinion really great examples of what restaurant websites could and should be. There are also other agencies in the UK delivering really well such as Ignite Hospitality and Evolving.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

The problem is that restaurant websites aren't seen as revenue makers, so they are merely vanity products and thus dominated by the whims of the restaurant owner, who (at the present time) likely has very little familiarity with web technologies, let alone web design. When websites become more appreciated as a source of revenue then they will be taken seriously enough to actually improve. The big problem today is that whereas it's easy to show someone a competing restaurant and see how popular it is, it's a lot more difficult to see the effectiveness of other restaurants' websites since all of that data is more or less invisible to anyone but the owner.

mashmac2 15y ago
So, the question is, how do we show the restaurant owners that having a better website will increase their revenue?
- irrumator 15y ago
  Why are you so sure it will? Can you give me use cases or examples where a restaurant owner stands to make money from his site anywhere other than booking reservations possibly?
  - floppydisk 15y ago
    Couple off the top of my head: 1) If you have live acts performing at your establishment Friday-Sunday, the website can raise awareness. 2) Specialty products / menu items. 3) Paraphernalia / SWAG from the restaurant. 4) Take out -- order online, pick up in store. 5) If you sell things like coffee beans, web presence increases the number of eyeballs on your product. At the end of the day, restaurants are about putting bodies in chairs and serving them food. Thus, the focus of a good website should be increasing traffic into the restaurant. One way I could see functionality between restaurant and website would be linking time-to-wait dynamically with the website. So if I go to a restaurant's website, I could see # of people waiting and average time to wait for the evening. This does go back to putting bodies in seats, but it would better link web presence with what actually happens in the restaurant.

latch 15y ago

In hong kong, openrice.com is a huge website for restaurants...and it's a disaster...so much opportunity for someone to clean their clock.

tibbon 15y ago

I was talking to a local business owner who runs a new Takoyaki place in town. I mentioned he didn't have a website. We had a good conversation about it, and he was hoping to get one up but wasn't quite sure what he needed. He's a young guy a pretty savvy overall, having acquired around 4,000 Likes on Facebook and frequently updating it. I told him (and he seemed to agree) that he needed a simple website that was the following - No Flash, just HTML5/CSS. - No music/sound at all - No long story about the owner, style, etc. If I'm here, I'm likely already sold, just let me know how to get there. At most, a short line on what Takoyaki is, since many Americans in Ohio are unfamiliar with it. - One page only (SEO people will cringe, but its better than Flash likely and easier to maintain. - Basic information given upfront: Name, address, Google Maps widget, phone number, hours and their standard menu which consists of 5 items. Mention to check Facebook/Twitter for specials (thinking of maintainability). Making sure none of the items are done as photos, which is a favorite of auto repair and sales places for unknown reasons. - Very basic colors and formatting. Ugly? Yes. But if I'm on my iPhone and looking for dinner, I don't care. I just need the details. - Links to their Facebook and Twitter accounts (maybe widgets for each if he wants to get fancy). - Google Analytics for long term tracking - Maybe a photo of the front of the establishment, didn't need to be fancy, just something a person who looked online would recognize when they were looking for it. No photos of the owner, etc. I don't claim to be an expert here, but this is what I want to see when I visit a website. Again, some of these are technically bad for SEO, but that isn't the point. Functionality should always trump SEO in my opinion. I actually even offerred that I do this for him for some free Takoyaki, since literally it sounds like 20 minutes in Textmate and then just throwing a static page up. Might stop by later this week to confirm the details. I'd rather see a local business do it right than wrong.

lancewiggs 15y ago
What a great idea to do it for him, but perhaps use Wordpress.com so he can more easily edit the result.
corin_ 15y ago
There's a genius business plan - well, perhaps "business" plan is slightly over-selling it. Spend a little time creating some really nice restaurant websites for a small number of your favourite local places (ones with either no website or a terrible website), offer it for free, with free hosting, and free updates, in return for free meals. Get a few of those done, and spend a few days a week eating out for free, in the knowledge that you're helping friendly local businesses whose services you've always enjoyed.

badmonkey0001 15y ago

These words make me close tab for the site I'm looking at right away: "Click to launch site". I came to your website... shouldn't it have launched already? Oh it's not a website - it's a multimedia presentation? Great. That's not what I came to your "website" for. No thanks. (Though I have to admit, there was a time when I actively looked for those sites. I made some good money going to restaurants and other small businesses around town offering to convert their sites from un-editable flash to a simple, skin-able CMS I had whipped up. They were always skeptical until I said "never pay for changing text or prices on your site again". After that, they were my customer and no longer the customer of the wannabe-techno-hipster that sold them the original contract for site and "updates".)

vigilanteweb 15y ago

I know there are a couple companies out there that focus just on making restaurant websites. There is Aioli (http://aioliweb.com http://aioliweb.com) here in Seattle and I know that they do the site for James Beard Award winner Lark (http://larkseattle.com http://larkseattle.com).

robryan 15y ago

Really they would probably do better with something outputting xml/json and getting their items/ prices/ location/ operation hours on every local business site in existence.

hxf148 15y ago

Check out http://infostripe.com http://infostripe.com Giving flash heavy restaurant sites a mobile option for customers was one of the design objectives. We are making great progress in the local area restaurants, mostly because it's free but also it's easy for the owners to setup and manage themselves.

yarian 15y ago

Incidentally, I came upon this restaurant site. Now that is a restaurant site done right: http://www.porte-sainte-claire.com/#home http://www.porte-sainte-claire.com/#home

skrebbel 15y ago

I can't relate to this at all. Restaurants in my area have crappy sites, but none of them annoying in ways this article describes. They're just a bit old, or the text is too small, or the pictures are ugly. You know, the usual. Is this SF local news? If so, why is it on HN?

Apple-Guy 15y ago
Have you ever tried to access a site on the go using a smart phone?

Luyt 15y ago

"a series of menu buttons that aren't labeled; you've got to mouse over each one to find out what you're about to click on" This actually has a name: 'Mystery Meat Navigation'[1]. It's one of the most irritating usability ailments. I thought it was extinct by now, but apparently it's still used on restaurant sites. It used to be quite popular on art- and band-related sites, some ten years ago. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation

robbie7 15y ago

We're going to make a CMS that focuses on the activities of local businesses. Our first focus is gonna be restaurants, cause indeed most of their website suck. So we're gonna give them the opportunity to be able to update their website via our CMS, their clients are gonna be able to order food online, order a table online (we still have to checkout opentable first tho, anyone know any other services like them?), the restaurant holder can easily edit their meu pages via a editor, upload images of their meals, divide the menu in appetisers etc, and ofcourse other pages like opening hours, contact page, album, ... What do you guys think about this? Other local companies we're gonna focus on are hotels, sportclubs, hairdresser, beautsaloon, garage, ...

robflynn 15y ago
I've been toying around with something similar in my spare time, though mine focuses only specifically on restaurants. I like the idea quite a bit, just haven't found the hours to dedicate to it just yet. Maybe after my product launch...

hootmon 15y ago

The author is too kind. Most proprietors of these things are 100% about food and service, and have no clue when it comes to tech. They tend to be very opinionated and tend to slough over anything outside of their core activity. They consider web sites just animated menus, and as such are suckers for sites as mini movies. Then tend to be action and not analysis oriented, so maybe after a few years of fail web sites, they will eventually stumble on what works instead of throwing money at pretentious wanna be movie makers.

noeltock 15y ago

I agree with a number of the comments, I setup a business selling websites to Restaurants (another user beat me to it in mentioning it ;) ) and have now transformed it into an SaaS ( http://www.theme-force.com http://www.theme-force.com ). You can sign up for it and play around with it for free ( open beta ). Feel free to provide any feedback/suggestions. Regarding the article; people have already touched on the main points, i.e. accessibility (html vs flash vs pdf) and content (essentials vs fluff), so there's not much to add here. However, I do feel Schema (something we've worked on a lot), will become more and more important. Cheers

joev 15y ago

Oblig: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website http://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website