Restaurant
Ceviche Bar
Ceviche DSM is a Cuban kitchen and cocktail bar in Des Moines' East Village, run by Tanya, a first-generation Cuban-American cooking her family's recipes. We built cevichedsm.com a six-page public site with a Havana golden-era look, backed by a custom admin panel that lets the staff run the menu, events, gallery, and hours themselves.
The challenge
Ceviche had a real story and a room people loved, but its web presence didn't carry either. A restaurant's site goes stale fast: menu items sell out, cocktails rotate, events change weekly, and hours shift around holidays. Most small restaurants either pay a developer for every edit or let the site drift until it's wrong. Tanya needed a site that sold the experience; family recipes, real rum, Havana in the East Village and that her team could keep current from a phone during service, with no technical skills and no waiting on anyone.
Goals
1. Tell Tanya's family story so the site sells the room and the heritage, not just the food. 2. Put the menu, events, gallery, and hours under the client's control through one simple admin. 3. Make "sold out tonight" and "feature this dish" one-tap actions, not content edits. 4. Drive visits: make the address, phone, directions, and hours easy to find on every page. 5. Build a direct audience the bar owns, through an email list for events and specials. 6. Rank locally, with clean page titles, descriptions, and social sharing previews on every page.
The approach
We designed around one idea Havana's golden era, in the East Village, and built the content so it lives in the admin, not the code. The public pages are fast static pages; the menu, events, gallery, and hours load live from the admin, so an edit there shows on the site immediately. Home. Opens on a full-bleed Havana street scene and the line "Havana lives here." It then tells the family story in brief, pulls in featured menu favorites and upcoming events from the admin, shows the room, and invites guests to join the Fedora Club email list. Address, phone, email, and hours sit in the footer of every page. Menu. Food, Drinks, and Specials tabs, grouped by category — Starters, Signature Cocktails, and more. Everything is pulled from the admin, so a sold-out dish or a new cocktail updates without touching the page. Our Story. A long-form page on the family who left Cuba carrying only their recipes, the Havana-inspired room, and how the kitchen cooks: Iowa-raised pork, wild-caught salmon, a Cubano pressed until the bread crackles, ceviche made to order. A pull quote from Tanya anchors it. Events. Live music, salsa nights, and rum tastings, listed from the admin calendar. Gallery. The room, the plates, the rum, and the people, with tap-to-enlarge photos managed in the admin. Contact & Visit. Address with one-tap Google Maps directions, an embedded map, tap-to-call phone, email, live hours, and a reservations note that steers larger parties to call while online booking is readied. Every page carries its own title, meta description, canonical URL, and Open Graph and Twitter card tags, so links shared on social and search show a proper preview. Pages include skip-to-content links for keyboard users. The admin panel The admin at /admin is built for restaurant staff, not web people. It uses the same warm palette as the site and a plain sidebar: Dashboard, Menu, Events, Gallery, and Hours & Info, plus View site and Log out. Menu manager. Items are grouped by category, and each category is tagged Food or Drink so it lands on the right tab. Each item shows its name, description, and price, with four buttons: • Edit — change the name, description, price, or category. • 86 it — restaurant shorthand for "out of it." One tap pulls a sold-out item from the live menu; one tap brings it back. • Feature — promotes a dish or drink to the "A few of our favorites" section on the homepage. • Delete — removes the item for good. Staff add items with + Add item and remove whole categories with Delete category. Items without a price show "No price set," so gaps are obvious at a glance. Events. Add, edit, and remove events; upcoming ones flow to the Events page and the homepage. Gallery. Upload and manage photos for the Gallery page. Hours & Info. Update opening hours and contact details once, and every page's footer and the Contact page update with them.
What was delivered
• Visual direction for the site: Havana golden-era palette, typography, and photography treatment. • Six responsive public pages: Home, Menu, Our Story, Events, Gallery, and Contact & Visit. • Brand story copy for the homepage and Our Story page. • Custom admin panel with Dashboard, Menu, Events, Gallery, and Hours & Info. • Menu manager with categories, Food/Drink tagging, and one-tap 86 and Feature controls. • Fedora Club email signup for events and specials. • Per-page SEO and social metadata: titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph, and Twitter cards. • Contact tools: tap-to-call, tap-to-email, Google Maps directions, and an embedded map. • Hosting, SSL, and deployment on the Midnight Mice platform.
Results
Ceviche DSM now owns its website day to day. Staff 86 a sold-out dish, feature a new cocktail, post Friday's salsa night, or change holiday hours in seconds, and the live site updates at once — no developer, no ticket, no wait. The site finally tells the story that makes the place different: a family's recipes carried out of Cuba, served in a room built to feel like old Havana. Guests can find the address, call, get directions, and check hours from any page, and the Fedora Club gives the bar a direct line to its regulars that it owns, not an algorithm.
Gallery
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