Angel African Kitchen
A website and online ordering experience for one of the UK's best-loved African restaurants, built so the food does the selling and a table is never more than one tap away.
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Overview
Angel African Kitchen is an African restaurant, lounge and bar in the UK with a real reputation for its jollof, pepper soup and party trays. When they came to me they had a busy dining room and almost no digital presence, bookings came through phone calls and Instagram DMs, and there was no way for a customer to browse the menu, order for delivery or reserve a table without speaking to someone. I designed and built the site end to end, then stayed on to support it.
The problem
Every enquiry (a table for six, a delivery, a catering quote for a wedding) landed on the same phone, usually during service. Staff were taking orders while plating food, and customers who found the restaurant on Google had nothing to look at except a map pin and a handful of reviews. The owners were losing bookings simply because there was nowhere to send people.
- No online menu, ordering or reservation system
- Bookings and catering enquiries competing with a live dinner service
- Strong word-of-mouth reputation with nothing online to back it up
- Most customers searching on a phone, late in the evening
My process
I started in the restaurant rather than in Figma. I sat with the owners through a service, watched how orders actually come in, and asked what they wished people already knew before walking through the door. Two answers shaped everything: the food is the reason people come, and the room is the reason they stay. So the design leads with big, warm photography of the dishes, and gives the lounge and bar their own space instead of burying them in an About page.
- Interviewed the owners and shadowed a full service to map real ordering behaviour
- Directed and edited food photography so every dish was shot the way it is served
- Built the navigation around what customers ask for: Menu, Order Online, Reserve a Table
- Set a warm gold-and-charcoal palette drawn from the restaurant's own interior and logo
- Prototyped the reservation and checkout flows and tested them on a phone before building
Building it
I built the site on WordPress with WooCommerce so the kitchen could edit prices, mark a dish sold out and pull a special without calling me. Online ordering, a cart and a reservation form all run through the same system, and the 'Reserve a Table' action follows the customer down every page. Because most traffic arrives on mobile after 6pm, I optimised images aggressively and kept the whole ordering path to three taps.
- WooCommerce ordering with a persistent cart and a sticky reservation call-to-action
- Mobile-first layout, compressed imagery and lazy loading for fast evening browsing
- Local SEO, structured restaurant data and Google Business alignment so it ranks for African food searches nearby
- Blog and events section for party nights, catering and seasonal menus
- Trained the team to update the menu, prices and opening hours themselves
The outcome
The restaurant now takes reservations and orders while the kitchen is cooking rather than in spite of it, and catering enquiries arrive with the details already filled in. The owners' own summary was the best feedback I got: people walk in already knowing what they want.
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