Marlow & Vine: A hospitality site that keeps bookings commission-free
A concept build for a café and wine bar: an editorial site with a readable menu and direct, commission-free table bookings.
What had to change
Marlow & Vine is a concept build: a sample Fitzroy brunch café and wine bar. The brief we set ourselves was a site that looked as considered as the venue — and, crucially, one that kept table bookings direct instead of handing a commission to a third-party platform on every cover.
The old habit of uploading a menu PDF also had to go: PDFs are slow, unreadable on phones, and invisible to search engines.
Who it’s built for
Each part of the build answers a real moment where the sale or the enquiry could be lost.
“What’s on the menu?”
A menu PDF is slow and unreadable on a phone.
“Why pay commission on our own diners?”
Booking marketplaces charge per cover.
What we built
Editorial, full-bleed design
A full-bleed hero and considered layout give the site the editorial feel of a good food magazine, matching the atmosphere of the venue itself.
Real, tabbed menu — no PDFs
The menu is built as fast, mobile-friendly tabbed content that customers can actually read on a phone — and that search engines can index, unlike a buried PDF.
Provider-agnostic direct bookings
Table booking is wired so the venue keeps zero-commission direct reservations, rather than paying per-cover fees to a booking marketplace on bookings it earned itself.
Restaurant & Menu schema
Restaurant and Menu JSON-LD helps the venue appear correctly in local search and rich results, so nearby diners find it when they search.
What the concept delivers
The concept shows a site as polished as the room, and one that protects its margins by keeping bookings direct and its menu discoverable in search.
Built with
Want something like this?
Tell us what you need and we will send a written estimate after a short call. You deal directly with the engineer who builds it.