Sodafish — A Digital Home For A Coastal Kitchen

01. The brief

Sodafish is a fine-dining seafood restaurant on the waterfront at Lakes Entrance, Victoria. The menu turns over with the catch. The events programme tracks the tourist seasons. The owners — Executive Chef Nick Mahlook and Design Director Emma Mahlook — wanted a site that reflected the room: warm, considered, generous with the photography, and never in the way.

Off-the-shelf restaurant platforms didn’t fit. They were either too rigid for a menu that changes weekly, or too generic for a brand with a strong editorial point of view. The work was a from-scratch build, in partnership with Clever Ops, a Melbourne studio that builds custom web and automation tools for owner-led businesses.

02. The approach

The front end is a static-first Next.js application, rendered at the edge so pages open instantly on a phone in the car park before service. Typography is set in Cormorant Garamond and Josefin Sans, on a cream and sage palette drawn directly from Emma’s design system for the restaurant.

Behind it is a purpose-built admin dashboard, custom tables in Postgres, and a content model designed around how Emma actually runs the restaurant — not how a generic CMS expects her to. The menu is tabbed by service and editable inline. Events and journal posts support markdown. Photography uploads accept either local files or Google Drive links so the team can publish from a shoot the same afternoon.

Reservations route through OpenTable. Gift vouchers are processed by Square, with the checkout embedded directly in the site. The map on the contact page uses Mapbox so the geography of the harbour reads correctly. None of these integrations show their seams; the guest experience is one continuous brand.

03. What shipped

• — A 32-route Next.js website, all static or edge-rendered, deployed on Vercel.
• — A custom admin dashboard covering menu, events, journal, media mentions, page content, and site settings, with password auth and signed-cookie sessions.
• — A reusable image system handling 1,135 photographs from the restaurant’s shoot archive, with Google-Drive-as-CMS for ongoing additions.
• — Integrations with Square (gift vouchers), OpenTable (reservations), Mapbox (location), and Instagram (live feed).
• — A typography and component system Emma can extend without writing code, so the brand stays consistent as the site grows.

04. The result

Sodafish now publishes a new menu, event, or journal entry in minutes instead of days, and does it without ever opening a support ticket. The site keeps pace with the kitchen — which was the entire point.