Marsa Table

Project background

Marsa Table is a self-initiated concept project, and the brand is fictional. We created it to show how we would approach a website for a seafood restaurant on the water in Dubai, open in the evenings and taking bookings for its terrace and a private dining room. For restaurants, the website mostly has three jobs: take bookings, show the menu and tell people how to get there.

Business objectives

Booking should be possible from the first screen without hunting for a link. The menu should be easy to read on a phone and easy for the team to update when the catch changes. Private dining needs its own clear story, and practical details such as valet parking and seasonal hours should be answered on the page.

Design strategy

The site is set at dusk. Deep navy, warm brass and off-white come from the view the restaurant sells: boats on the harbour as the light goes. The hero is a typographic composition in TeX Gyre Pagella with a brass line drawing of a dhow, a low moon and a repeating wave pattern that fades into the sea. Inter is used for interface text such as form fields and opening hours.

The booking panel overlaps the bottom of the hero so it is always the next thing the eye lands on. It asks for date, time, guests and seating preference, then shows available time slots, with unavailable times clearly marked. The menu is presented like a printed card: course tabs on the left, dish names with dotted leaders and prices, short italic descriptions and simple dietary tags. Private dining uses a plan drawing of the long table laid for sixteen, with capacities and menu options listed beside it. The visit section pairs a simple harbour map with opening hours and parking notes.

Development approach

We would build the site as a fast, mostly static front end with a small CMS for menus, dishes, prices and dietary tags, so the team can change a dish in a minute. Booking would connect to the restaurant’s reservation system through its API or a styled embed, so availability is always live and confirmations come from one place.

Menus would be real text rather than images or PDFs, which helps accessibility and search. Each page would include restaurant structured data with address, opening hours and menu links, supporting local search and map results. On mobile the booking fields reflow into a simple grid, menu tabs scroll sideways and the reserve button stays in the header. Images and illustrations would be optimised, and text colours are chosen to keep strong contrast against the dark background.

What this concept demonstrates

It shows how we would build a restaurant website around the actions that matter, booking and reading the menu, while giving it an atmosphere that feels specific to the place rather than a generic hospitality template.