Han Chinese

Han Chinese is a long-established independent restaurant on St Mary’s Road in Market Harborough, serving Cantonese and regional Chinese cooking in an eighty-seat room upstairs, to eat in or to take home. Its reputation has been built over three decades. It is the sister restaurant to Taste Social, which the studio also built.

Lune Studio designed and built the restaurant’s website.

The brief

Han takes its bookings over the phone. That puts more weight on the website rather than less. Nothing on the site closes the sale, so the site has to answer every question someone might have before they ring, and then make ringing effortless.

Most of that work falls to the menu. A restaurant with an à la carte, a lunch menu, banquets, a wine list and a full set of allergens has a lot to communicate, and most people are reading it on a phone while deciding where to eat tonight.

The whole menu on one page

Everything the kitchen serves sits on a single page, divided into the lunch menu, the à la carte, the banquets, offers, drinks, wine and the allergen guide. It is all text on the page rather than a PDF to download, so it reads properly on a phone and someone can move straight to the part they want.

Dishes carry their own markers for spicy, contains nuts and chef’s signature, and allergens are listed against each dish. The two-course lunch, a long-standing local habit, leads the page.

Making the call easy

The phone number sits in the header of every page and dials straight out on a phone. Opening hours, the address and the walk from the station are never more than a tap away, and anyone who would rather write can send a booking request instead. Collection is explained in the same place: ring with the order and everything on the à la carte can be taken home.

The contact page also says plainly that the entrance has a step and is not wheelchair accessible, and asks anyone affected to ring ahead. It is a small thing to publish, and it matters a great deal to the person it applies to.

Larger tables

Group bookings are worth more to a restaurant than a table for two, so private dining has its own page. It explains why a set menu agreed in advance works better for a big table, covers birthdays, family gatherings, work dinners, Christmas and Chinese New Year, and answers the questions that decide the booking: how many the room seats, how far ahead to book, what happens about allergies, deposits and bringing a cake.

Reviews where they count

The restaurant’s Google rating, an average of 4.5 from more than a hundred reviews, is on the homepage with the reviews themselves, and there is a prompt asking recent diners to leave one. The same rating and the restaurant’s details are also given to search engines in a form they can read, which is what allows the stars to appear next to Han in local results.

The prompt is handled with some care. Anyone whose meal was not right is asked to ring or email instead, so the invitation collects genuine reviews rather than steering complaints onto a public page.

The look

The design stays close to the restaurant: a warm off-white ground, the deep red of the Han seal, and photographs of the dining room and the food. It is calm rather than busy, which is what the room is like.

The outcome

A site that does the work a phone booking cannot. Someone can read the entire menu, check the allergens, see what a banquet involves, find the opening hours and know where to park, then press one button and speak to the restaurant.