Kabab Cafe’s first online store.

Kabab Cafe didn’t need a website to be busy. The family has run it in the Gateway shopping center since 2009, cooking the same dishes the same way: halal, never fried, all of it grilled, made fresh every day. For most of that time the business lived inside its four walls. You walked in, you ordered, you ate. This May, part of it went online for the first time.

That mattered, because COVID-19 had been hard on them, the way it was hard on most small restaurants. Alongside the kitchen they run their own Persian market, and its reach ended at the edge of the Gateway parking lot. Yelp reviewers had ranked Kabab Cafe the second-best of fifteen to twenty kebab and Persian places in the area, behind only a far pricier, upscale spot, so the demand was clearly there. The question I sat down with them to answer was simple: how does someone who doesn’t live near Wayne buy from them?

What I built

The answer was Kabab Cafe Market. I took their entire in-store inventory and digitized it into a Shopify store: every Persian good they stock, listed and priced, with a checkout that works on a phone and ships well beyond Wayne. The storefront is styled to match the restaurant, and there’s a clear path to it from the main site, so a regular and a stranger two states away land in the same place.

A second front door

A restaurant’s revenue usually stops at the door. For a family business that had been squeezed since COVID, a second channel that runs day and night, with no third party skimming the top, isn’t a vanity project. It’s room to breathe, and a way to reach the people who already loved the food but moved away.

The part that mattered most

Places like this last precisely because they don’t chase every trend, and the work had to respect that. My job wasn’t to “modernize” Kabab Cafe; it was to take what already worked, the food and the trust people have in it, and make it buyable from anywhere. Nothing it didn’t need.

The full month-by-month build journal, co-written with the student writer who shadowed the project, is on the way. For now you can see the case study or visit the site itself.