Leo Catering

A cafe became something else

Leo started as a Sydenham cafe in 2021: families, creatives and people working on laptops. Customers kept asking the founder, Jack, to cook for dinners, weddings and office lunches. Eventually the catering work needed its own address online.

The brief was about appetite before features. The food is plant-led, but the site could not sound like it was waiting to correct somebody. It needed to look like somewhere you would want to eat and make asking for a quote feel closer to a message than an application form.

"Same food, same hands, in your space."

Constraints

• Appetite first. Lead with the photographs and keep the copy short.
• Plant-led, not preachy. The menu is vegan and vegetarian; the tone does not demand a round of applause for that.
• One action. Every section should make the final enquiry easier instead of inventing another button.
• Small running cost. Static hosting on Vercel, with no platform subscription waiting underneath it.

Four events, one person cooking

Private dinners, whole-day weddings, office lunches and wakes do not naturally sit in the same sales paragraph. The job was to hold all four without turning Jack into a catering corporation or the page into a menu of packages.

• The hero. Deep navy, a hand-drawn Leo wordmark and one line: plant-led food for real events.
• Four ways to book. Supper at yours, a whole-day wedding, lunch for the team, and the quieter “when it has to be right” for wakes and gatherings.
• Jack, in his own words. A founder section that makes the business read as a person. Not a logo with an origin story attached.
• Recent events. Plates from actual jobs, labelled with a date and place. Proof you can eat. No stock photography of a hand placing parsley.

The page

The finished site is one scroll: Hero → What we cater → About Jack → Recent events → Sourcing & values → Enquiry → Footer. No branch in the middle, no hidden service maze, one quote form at the end.

Three decisions that held it together

• Navy and gold, not green. The obvious plant-led palette is sage, leaves and a lovely beige bowl. Leo uses deep navy and warm gold so it reads as an evening people want to attend, not a health-food aisle.
• The photographs do the selling. Food Jack actually cooked, shot close. The copy knows when to get out of the way.
• One gentle enquiry. The form asks for a date, rough guest count and kind of event, then promises a menu sketch and price within two working days. Enough information to answer; not enough fields to make someone reconsider the event.

Where it landed

The site is live at leo-catering.vercel.app. It is deployed as static files on Vercel, so the running cost is effectively the domain. Enquiries go straight to Leo's inbox, and the event list is structured so a new plate can be added when there is one worth showing.

The handover included semantic headings, alt text on every plate, keyboard-reachable navigation and form controls, and lazy-loaded images so the long page stays quick on a phone.

Still open

• Move the enquiry form to a managed inbox or CRM if the volume grows enough to justify one.
• Give Jack a lightweight way to add event photographs without touching markup.
• Add seasonal menu notes when the kitchen changes the food. The ingredients are seasonal; the copy should admit it.