Lisbon, Portugal · 2026
An identity, a menu that changes daily, and two languages that never split.
आराधना · an offering
Brand identity, print collateral and a bilingual reservation site for a Nepali and Indian restaurant in Lisbon — built for diners who know the food and for those deciding whether they dare.
Why they came to us
Good food, a full room, and almost no way to find either.
Aradhana has been feeding a Lisbon neighbourhood Nepali and Indian food for years, and the reviews say the things a restaurant wants said — friendly, generous, good value. None of that was reaching anyone who had not already been.
A Facebook page
was doing the job of a website. On several listing sites it was the website — the link a hungry person in Lisbon tapped when they wanted to know what was on and whether to book.
Four spellings
of the restaurant’s own name were in circulation across public listings — Aradhana, Aaradhana, Aradana, Aradhna. Four spellings is four businesses as far as a search engine is concerned.
Two languages
and no consistent way to serve either. Portuguese for the neighbourhood, English for everyone else, and a menu that changes by the day underneath both.
What we had to solve
Four problems, and what we did about each one.
None of them decorative. Every one came out of how the restaurant actually trades — who walks past the door, what changes on the menu, and the question a Lisbon diner is too polite to ask.
01
Four audiences, one identity
Nepali and Indian diners who know the food, Portuguese locals who mostly do not, and tourists deciding in ninety seconds. Lean too far into heritage and Lisbon walks past; sand it down and you are another curry house. The mark had to read as considered to all four.
What we built
One mark, built from three things the restaurant already had: the arch over its door, the wave of the Tagus, and two ears of wheat. It reads as considered in Lisbon and as familiar to a Nepali diner, because it never had to choose.
02
A menu that changes daily
Three mains rotate every day of the week on top of a fixed carte. A PDF cannot express that, and a diner who arrives expecting Tuesday’s korma on a Wednesday is a complaint, not a customer.
What we built
The site knows what day it is. Open it on a Wednesday and Wednesday’s three dishes are already on screen — nobody at the restaurant updates anything, and no guest arrives expecting the wrong curry.
03
Heat, before the objection forms
The most common reason a Portuguese diner skips an Indian restaurant is a guess about how hot the food will be. Nothing on the old listings answered it, so the answer had to be structural, not a line in the FAQ.
What we built
A four-step heat scale sits on the menu itself, in both languages, before the guest has to ask. The question that was quietly losing bookings is answered on the way in.
04
Reservations without a platform
Booking platforms take a commission on every cover and put a login between a hungry guest and a table. For a single restaurant doing its own service, that is a tax and a drop-off point, not a feature.
What we built
A booking form that emails the restaurant directly — no commission, no third-party widget, no guest login. It arrives with the date, the party size and how they want the food cooked, so the callback is one call.
The identity
An arch, a wave, and two ears of wheat.
The mark is a Lisbon doorway with a Devanagari-weighted A set inside it. Wheat down both sides for the kitchen, a water line beneath for the Tagus. It reads as a crest at signage size and survives being stamped in one colour on a loyalty card.
The palette is deliberately not a “spice” palette. Navy and gold do the formal work; the one Portuguese note is azulejo blue, borrowed from the tiles on the street outside. Spice orange exists in the system for exactly one job — heat indicators — and is never used decoratively.
Set in Fraunces for display and Marcellus for the wordmark. The Devanagari line is not an ornament: it is how the restaurant’s own community reads the name.
What we built
Try it yourself — this is the real thing, running.
Not screenshots. The three interactions below are rebuilt here with the restaurant’s own copy and photography, so you can operate them rather than take our word for it.
Live rebuild — try it
One switch changes the hero, the heat guide and the weekday menu together, because on the real site it does too. Portuguese is the default, not the fallback.
Lisboa · Restaurante Indiano
Especiarias da Índia,
alma de Lisboa.
आराधना · uma oferenda
Especiarias tostadas na nossa cozinha, pão acabado de sair do tandoor e a luz dourada de Lisboa — alta cozinha indiana servida como uma oferenda à mesa.
✓ Confirmação por email ou telefone
A nossa história
Uma devoção, servida à mesa.
Aradhana significa “oferenda” em sânscrito. Trouxemos receitas do Norte da Índia, preservadas há gerações, para os arcos e azulejos de Lisboa.
Why it matters
Across 136 paired strings, Portuguese runs 9% longer than English, and is the longer of the two on 89 of them.
The pressure is not on paragraphs — it is on buttons. “Hot” becomes “Picante”, more than twice the width in the same tab. Every control on the site is sized to the Portuguese string, so switching to English never leaves a gap where a word used to be.
Especiarias dão sabor. O picante é uma escolha.
Todos os pratos podem ser preparados sem picante, suaves, médios ou picantes — sem perder os aromas que tornam cada receita especial.
✓Suave, aromático e preparado ao seu gosto.
Pode confirmar a preferência ao reservar →
Menu de almoço
Hoje à mesa, em Lisboa
Reading Lisbon time…
Neste dia
Quarta
- Frango kadai
- Korma de camarão
- Caril de feijão-vermelhoVegetariano
Naan simples e arroz branco incluídos.
No prices anywhere — the client’s decision, and the right one for a lunch menu that changes. The dial never advances by itself: content that moves while someone is reading it is disorienting, so the day only changes when Lisbon’s does or when you ask it to.
What they got
The website, the room, and the food.
The identity holds at every scale: a full-screen welcome, a practical lunch tool, and the real atmosphere diners find when they arrive.
Built to outlast us
A restaurant should not need an agency to keep its website up.
Most restaurant websites die quietly. Something needs updating, nobody updates it, and eighteen months later the menu is wrong and the booking form has stopped sending. We built this so that cannot happen.
There is no software to maintain and no database of customers to protect. Reservations arrive as an email in the inbox the team already reads, carrying the guest’s heat preference with them, so the callback is one call.
- Nothing to break
- No plugins
- Plain HTML, CSS and one script. There is no plugin to update and nothing to stop working the week you forget to update it.
- Nothing to hack
- No database
- Bookings arrive by email. There is no customer database sitting on a server waiting to leak, because there is no database.
- No monthly fee
- 0 platforms
- No booking service taking a cut of every cover, and no subscription that quietly rises each year.
- Two languages, one site
- PT + EN
- Complete Portuguese and English, switching together everywhere. Portuguese is the default, because the neighbourhood comes first.
- Fast on a phone
- 3.4 MB
- Every photograph compressed and loaded only when it is scrolled to — most people decide where to eat standing on a street with one bar of signal.
- Moves anywhere
- 2 hosts
- It runs on their current hosting or on a modern platform without a rewrite, so they are not locked to whoever set it up.
Measurement status
Built and delivered. Not launched.
The website build and the creative production are both complete and sitting with the client for review. Aradhana has not gone live, so there is no traffic, no reservation volume and no ranking to report — and this page will not invent any.
The first numbers worth publishing arrive roughly ninety days after launch: reservation requests per week, the share arriving in Portuguese versus English, and how many guests set a heat preference before booking. Until the client approves and the site is live, there is nothing honest to put here.
Verified 12 August 2026
- Brand identity, print collateral and landing page delivered
- Complete
- Languages shipped, both complete
- PT + ENCheckable
- Mains rotating across the weekly lunch menu
- 21
- Reservation endpoints, one contract, two hosts
- 2
- Front-end dependencies
- 0Checkable
- Live traffic, rankings or reservation data
- None yet
Services used
Every one of these ran in-house. The people who scoped Aradhana Restaurant and Bar are the people who built it — there is no account layer between the pitch and the work.
Want a build like this?
Tell us the market, the languages and the deadline. We will tell you what it takes and what it costs before you commit to anything.