Café Concerto

Café Concerto has been part of Casegas, a small village in the Serra da Estrela, for as long as anyone can remember: a café from another era, recently taken over and brought back to life. The menu there never sits still: a dish sells out, a price moves, something new turns up at the weekend. And nobody in a village café has the time, or the slightest desire, to look after a website.

So I turned the problem on its head. Instead of a site someone would have to maintain, I built the owner a digital chalkboard: something he wipes clean and rewrites himself, from his phone, without knowing the first thing about the web. The whole project follows from that one idea.

Every table has its own QR code in the café's colours, logo at the centre, generated straight from the admin. Scan it and the menu opens in Portuguese, English or French. Behind the counter, everything is written in Portuguese only: the translations happen automatically, free of charge, with no API key and no subscription. The menu also hands you the Wi-Fi and a link to leave a Google review.

Above all, it lives. When he changes a price or marks a dish as sold out, every phone with the menu already open updates within seconds, without reloading the page. The chalkboard is wiped and rewritten on every screen in the room at once.

The admin is deliberately bare-bones, designed for someone who has never touched the web. The owner draws his dining room on a 2D floor plan, drops his tables onto it and moves them with a finger; each table gets its own QR code, ready to reprint as a PDF sheet whenever he needs it.

Everywhere, little help bubbles explain what each screen is for, and can be switched off once he knows his way around. My real measure of success has nothing to do with technology: it's that he never has to ring me for help.