Best Restaurant web sites?

[Motte Picquet]

Curious what people think about restaurant sites out there-- what are your favorites in terms of design/ease of navigation/content...? Some of my favorites include sites for Blue Hill at Stone Barns, French Laundry, Alinea....

[boltthrower]

I agree with all the input here. There shouldn't be music, flash ..this and that .. it has to be informative. I like this website: http://www.himalayanrestaurant.com , one of my favorites place to eat. Not only the site provides about restaurant info but detail food information on how to eat, how to order, kids friendly, group friendly, history so on ...

[Sharuf]

A restaurant website should be, first of all, about providing useful information in a straightforward accessible way. It should not be about this really really cool brainstorm your website guy has for a mind-blowing production involving motion, sound, graphics etc.

[jgg13]

I'll tell you what's required for a resto website to not suck in my eyes. Sadly, most resto websites break most, and usually all of these rules

- either no flash or very little flash. no flash *ever* used for navigation. no flash *ever* used in a way that you can't easily avoid
- no music
- Provide your contact information & hours in an extremely visible location
- Feel free to provide a PDF menu, but provide all menus in basic HTML as well
- KISS: Don't listen to the web designer who is telling you to gussy your site up. The best sites are simple ones. I don't care about your "image", I want specific information and the best chance you have of getting me as a customer is presenting that information in a standard format

[Peter Cherches]

In general, I'd say there's no correlation between quality of restaurant and quality of website. Most restaurant websites are just plain frustrating. Many are infuriating. I've written two rants on the subject.

http://petercherches.blogspot.com/2006/09/when-good-restaurants-do-bad-websites.html

http://petercherches.blogspot.com/200...

[sgwood415]

www.sketch.uk.com

This is my favorite website from a restaurant. It's Sketch in London.

[tenacity]

Erk. That Sketch site is absolutely horrible.

[LindaWhit]

That is beyond horrible - it's atrocious!

[randyhusted]

Possibly the worst website I've seen. It took so long to load that I almost fell asleep.

[chef chicklet]

i love it! My 4 year old keeps asking to look at it!

[Robert Lauriston]

My favorite is oliveto.com. To bypass the annoying Flash front door I bookmark http://www.oliveto.com/menus.html to go straight to the menus. They upload a PDF of their dinner menu every day, and have their full wine list online, both with prices.

http://pizzaiolooakland.com is pretty good except they upload their menus as low-res JPEG images that don't print well.

[2top]

This is a great web site to a great restaurant I discovered this summer.
http://www.jazzdsavannah.com/

[ClaireWalter]

There's a gorgeous site w/ good recipes at http://papayapate.blogspot.com/.

[chowfat]

ClarieWalter,

Can you send me an invite to the papayapate blog? Or how can one get an invitation?

Thanks for sharing.

[jgg13]

Any site that uses a flash front door at all sucks right off the top. And any resto site that only provides menus in a non-html format sucks as well.

[wendyfisk]

Oh - but looking again I think you're referring to the sites of the restaurants themselves! sorry. In my opinion some of the most personal restaurants run them themselves and some of my best finds don't have them at all. I like the ones with a restaurant blog section and recipes.