Kabab Cafe
An Astoria institution — online for the first time.
Ali has been making the same dishes the same way since 2009. The site needed to feel as committed as the food: menu, story, hours, an honest press archive, and a reservation flow built around the way the maître d' actually works.
- Page weight
- 48kb
- First paint
- 0.3s
- Founded
- 2009
- Service
- Tue–Sun
A fifteen-year institution, finally online.
Kabab Cafe is the kind of place locals send out-of-town friends to without saying which dish to order. Ali cooks. His mother prepped vegetables in the kitchen for years. The New York Times wrote about them in 2014. Until this site, the only way to reserve a table was to call between three and five in the afternoon, and the only way to see the menu was to walk in.
The brief was simple and uncompromising: the website should feel as committed as the cooking. No stock food photography. No template restaurant theme. No bullet-list "ambiance." Just the food, the story, the hours, the press, and a way to reserve a table that doesn't route through someone else's commission engine.
Highlights.
- Single-page menu with seasonal availability
- Hand-typeset story page with the founding history
- Press archive — every clipping since 2009
- Reservation flow tuned to the actual host workflow
- Hours, address, and transit directions front-and-center
- Sub-50KB total page weight on every route
- Location
- Astoria, NY
- URL
- kababcafe.com
- Shipped
- 2024
- Stack
- Static, hand-coded