LORO restaurant website with menus, catering and events

LORO is a restaurant that serves smoked meats, frozen cocktails and vegetable dishes in a laid-back setting. Techcelerant designed and built its website, LORO Eats. The site gives guests interactive menus, a short path to a reservation, pages for catering and private events, and a layout that reflects the range of food on the menu.

The client

LORO's personality is loud and relaxed at the same time. The homepage headline says it plainly: "Smoked meats, boozy slushees, rad veggies, chill vibes." The restaurant also runs a catering business and hosts events, so it serves three groups of people: diners who want a table, offices and families who want food delivered, and planners who want to book the space.

The problem

A restaurant website gets one or two seconds to answer a guest's questions. What do they serve? Is it my kind of place? Can I get a table? LORO had a lot to say. It has a meat program, a vegetable program, a bar, catering and events, and it wanted to tell the story of the chefs behind it. The challenge was to show all of that without turning the site into a wall of text, and to keep the restaurant's playful voice from getting lost in a generic template.

Catering and events also needed their own space. Those inquiries are worth a lot to a restaurant, and they get buried when they sit at the bottom of a menu page.

What we built

We built a single homepage that works like a tasting menu, followed by focused pages for each way to visit LORO.

• A hero section with the restaurant's tagline, a short introduction and a hand-drawn tiger illustration.
• A smoked meats block headed "Low & slow is the only way to go," paired with a close crop of brisket being sliced.
• A vegetable block, "Veggies everyone will love," with plated dishes in rounded photo frames.
• A drinks band, "Grab a drink and let the good times flow," with a row of photos of cocktails and guests.
• Interactive menus that guests can open by section and browse on a phone.
• A reservation button in the header, so a guest can book from any page.
• A catering page, "Three ways to Loro for gatherings of all sizes," split into everyday catering, offsite event catering and hosting an event at LORO.
• A feature page about the chefs behind the restaurant, with large type and portrait cutouts.

Design decisions

The site uses a cream background instead of white. It reads warmer, and it lets the food photos and the navy and coral accents stand out. We paired a heavy, rounded serif for headlines with a typewriter-style face for body copy. The serif carries the restaurant's attitude. The typewriter face keeps menu details and short paragraphs readable and gives them a handmade feel.

Illustrations do a lot of the work. The tiger, the agave plant, the cocktail glasses and the small doodles around each section came from the restaurant's own brand style. They give each block a different character while keeping the page consistent, so a guest scrolling on a phone always knows they are still on LORO's site.

Photos sit inside soft, rounded frames. That shape repeats across the homepage and the catering page and keeps a busy layout from feeling crowded. Each section follows the same pattern: a short headline, two or three sentences, and one link. Guests can skim the headlines and still get the full picture.

We gave the three catering options equal weight as navy tiles. A planner can see every choice at once and pick the one that fits the size of the group.

The result

LORO now has a website that sounds like the restaurant. Guests can see what is on the menu, book a table from the header and find the bar program without digging. Groups have a clear page for catering and events, with each option laid out side by side. The client's team can update menus and event details as the seasons change, and the illustrated style gives them a kit they can reuse on new pages.

For more on structuring a first screen like this one, read our guide to homepage design best practices.

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