Psari Seafood

A perishable document on a permanent website

Seafood is the hardest category on any menu to publish. Whole fish is sold by the kilo at a price that moves with the wholesaler, the catch changes with what landed, and food cost on fish is already the thinnest line on the sheet. A restaurant working to a prime-cost target cannot absorb a wholesale swing it has quietly advertised away.

A published price is a standing offer against a cost that has already moved.

the problem, in one line

The operational failure is small and constant. A guest arrives quoting last month's price, or orders something 86'd two days ago. The restaurant either eats the difference or starts service with an argument at the table. Neither is expensive once; both are expensive every week.

And the people who know what is actually on today are on the pass, not in an admin panel. Mid-service, nobody is logging into a CMS — so any solution that costs the kitchen training or attention will be abandoned inside a month, and the menu will go stale again. That constraint, not the technology, defined the brief.

Design, build, and a spreadsheet that powers the menu

Our mission was to move menu ownership back to the pass without asking the brigade to learn anything. We designed and built the site, then wired the menu to the one tool the team already used daily: a Google Sheet, where changing a cell reprices the live site in seconds. Adoption was the design goal — a menu system is only as current as the least-motivated person expected to update it during a busy service.

Appetite-first design, spreadsheet-driven menu

The design leads with full-bleed dish photography — platters straight from the pass, the day's fish on ice — because that is what does the selling before a single price is read, and because a strong direct channel is what keeps covers off delivery aggregators charging a quarter of the ticket in commission.

Behind it, the kitchen's own sheet drives the published menu: change a price there and the site follows within seconds, with none of the bookkeeping handled by hand. The menu is modelled in the restaurant's own sections rather than generic categories — salads, starters, fish by the kilo, mains, sides and soups. Keeping the by-the-kilo line as a first-class section is the point: it is the one that reprices most often and carries the most margin risk.

The sheet is the single source of truth by design. There is no second place to edit a price, so the site and the pass cannot disagree.

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