Restaurant website design: bad, but oh so beautiful

I hate to bring up another example of bad restaurant website design (no, really, I do), but I couldn't let this go unnoted.

On Friday night, we're eating at Adour, the newest restaurant in Alain Ducasse's empire.

This guy is at the top of the league. Has multiple Michelin stars. Knows his stuff.

And yet the site for Adour ... well ... c'est pas bon.

Oh, it's gorgeous, for sure. Check out the eight time-lapse movies: iconic images, all movement and light, they're New York in a nutshell.

And now (after turning off the intrusive lounge-jazz soundtrack), I want to find a menu.



Hmm ... my choices are "Reservations," "Map," "Facts" and "About"; I can probably dismiss the first two, but what's the difference between the last two?

Oh, and there's a typo on the map.



Am I being picky? Should I learn to back off? Frankly, no. While I don't pay too much mind to prices (especially for special occasions), it's worth noting that Adour's least expensive app is $19. The cheapest main (olive oil-poached cod) is $32.

Adour is intended for diners who expect impeccable service, excellent ingredients, flawless presentation. And yet the message I get from the site is: lovely to look at, but don't expect us to be too concerned about the details.

I guess I'll just have to hope that the kitchen staff pay more attention to their work than the site designers did ...

Restaurant website design: it's easy to be bad

Rest easy, my peoples: we have found our restaurant for Saturday evening in NYC. We'll be making a return trip to Wallsé, the rather lovely one-Michelin-starred Austrian place in the West Village. Thanks for your suggestions; they may come in handy for lunch!

It took a while for us to make a decision; OpenTable had 500+ restaurants in Manhattan alone with availability for next Saturday night, and even after dismissing a few categories whole-cloth (no steakhouse, no seafood, not French for a change), that still left a couple of hundred options.

So we started exploring. And we quickly realized there are a lot of bad restaurant websites out there.

One great (or terrible) example is the all-Flash Morimoto New York. First you have to click to launch the site. Then there's the ten-second delay while it loads. Then--like it or not--you get mood-setting music (hunt for the five-pixel-wide speaker icon to turn it off).

It looks like this (I added a hint so you can find the nav):



Click an option, and giant crab claws and Ginsu knives bum-rush the screen. The type size remains defiantly small.

While crafting this slick choreography of image and music, did anyone check, you know, the text?



At The Water Club, we find not so much a poorly designed restaurant website as a subtly strange choice of functionality. Say you're looking for a menu. Where are you most likely to click?



The item in the "Site Features" section won't help--nothing there is clickable, even though it's in the most eye-catching part of the page. For some reason, only the top nav is active. Stuff like this makes me wonder: if they don't know how to communicate with customers online, what will service be like tableside?

Oh, also, the FAQ section is "under construction." Is this because no one ever asks any questions?

But the prize for bad restaurant website design goes to AZZA Restaurant and Lounge, and not only because the reviews in the press-clippings section skip away before you can finish reading them. No, this site goes above and beyond.

But don't take my word for it. Go check it out, and take a look at the menu for yourself.

I'll wait here.