The Challenge
Konj has been serving Persian food on Grindlay Street since 2019, and word of mouth did most of the work. Everything else was scattered. Table bookings came through phone calls, gift cards through messages, catering enquiries through Instagram DMs, and press mentions lived on other people’s websites. There was no single place a guest could land on and do what they came to do.
The search problem was bigger. Edinburgh has a crowded restaurant market, and people looking for halal or Persian food were finding aggregator listings and chains instead of Konj. Faranak, the owner and patron chef, wanted a site that felt like the room itself: warm, Persian, calm. Not a stock template with a menu PDF attached at the bottom.
What We Built
A full WordPress and Elementor site, built page by page around how guests actually behave. Home, Menu, Story, Press, Gallery, Catering, Gift Cards, Recipes & Guides, and Contact, with the restaurant’s own photography carrying the design instead of stock imagery.
Bookings run through EasyTable, reachable from a fixed Book a Table button in the header on every page and from each section that gives someone a reason to book: the Sunday brunch block, the food sections, the events. Gift cards sell through a connected SumUp store, with a dedicated terms page so Faranak never has to explain the rules over the phone.
Catering was the part that needed real thought. The old process was a message saying “how much for catering?” followed by four rounds of back and forth. We built an enquiry form that collects the brief up front: party size, type of event, date, start time, and tick boxes for hot water, reheating and washing facilities, and serving staff. Faranak now opens an enquiry with enough detail to quote it.
The menus change with the seasons, so hand-building them in Elementor would have meant calling us every few months. Instead each menu sits as a designed page with a View PDF link beside it. Set menu, spring menu, dessert menu. Faranak swaps the files herself in a couple of minutes.
For search, we built a small blog cluster around what people in Edinburgh actually type: Persian dishes Edinburgh, halal restaurants Edinburgh, and a beginner’s guide to Persian cuisine. Each post links back to the menu and the booking page. Events get their own pages too, so the Persian supper club at The Tower in Portobello has a proper page with the eight-course story on it, ready to link from Instagram instead of a screenshot in a story.
The Results
Konj now has one address that does the work. A guest can read the story, look at the current menu, book a table, buy a gift card, reserve a brunch seat, or send a catering brief without leaving the site or waiting for a reply.
The press page does the convincing that the restaurant used to do in conversation. The blog posts target the exact searches Konj was missing. And the parts that used to eat Faranak’s evenings, answering the same questions about menus, catering and gift cards, now answer themselves.
