Gifa Restaurant & Lounge

Client: Gifa Restaurant & Lounge
Industry: Hospitality
Year: 2026

A restaurant and lounge site for Seven Sisters Road, London: menu, gallery, events, private hire and table reservations, all managed by the restaurant from its own dashboard.

Tables behind menu, bookings and events

PDF menus to keep in sync

Place the restaurant edits everything

What it covers

Menu management
Table reservations
Private hire enquiries
Events calendar
Gallery
Contact & opening hours
Content dashboard

A menu that changes is a database, not a PDF

Most restaurant sites publish the menu as an image or a PDF that goes stale the week after launch. Here the menu is data: dishes, categories, prices and descriptions the restaurant edits itself, which means the site is still accurate in six months.

Everything a room needs to fill itself

Reservations, private hire enquiries, an events calendar and a gallery, alongside the delivery partner link. The site is the front of house for people who have not walked in yet.

Built for the evening

The design is dark and warm by default because that is what the room is like, and because a restaurant site is mostly opened at night on a phone.

How it was built

Framework: SvelteKit

Server load functions, form actions and endpoints; SSR by default.
Svelte 5

Runes for reactivity ($state, $derived, $effect).
Language: TypeScript

Strict mode across app and server code.
Data: MySQL

Primary datastore.
Drizzle Kit

Committed SQL migrations rather than push-to-prod diffing.
Drizzle ORM

Typed schema and queries, with migrations generated from the schema.
Auth: Better Auth

Session-based auth with server-side verification.
Forms: Superforms

Progressive-enhancement forms with server-side validation.
Zod

One schema validating both client and server.
UI: TanStack Table

Sorting, filtering and pagination for admin tables.
Chart.js

Reporting charts.
Dark mode

System-aware theme switching.
Lucide

Icon set.
Bits UI

Headless primitives behind the component library.
Embla

Carousels.
Tailwind CSS

Utility-first styling with a project design token layer.
Infrastructure: Client image compression

Uploads compressed in the browser before hitting the server.
Nodemailer

Transactional email over SMTP.

Inside the system

Gifa Restaurant and Lounge home page — The site opens the way the room does: dark, warm, and pointed straight at booking a table.

Gifa menu page — The menu is data the restaurant edits, not an image that goes stale.

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