Behind the scenes of a Paris restaurant website: Pépé Ronchon

Hello everyone! Today I wanted to take you behind the scenes of a project that I really liked: the redesign of the Pépé Ronchon website. Two Italian restaurants in Paris, a family story in the background and, above all, a very good excuse to go photograph pizzas and try the menu.

Pépé is a long-time friend of my father’s. I had met him several times when I still lived with him, but I had never been to his restaurants. When he found himself without a webmaster, he called me to take over his site. Initially, it was mainly about putting some order back into the existing situation. Then, as often happens, one thing led to another and we eventually got everything back up and running again with Minuit d’Orsay. I think I'm incapable of doing things halfway, ahah.

Two restaurants, two very different moods

Pépé Ronchon is two Italian addresses that don’t tell the same evening story at all. Pizza is a lively Neapolitan pizzeria, with the open kitchen, the tables close together and the pizzas passing by your eyes. Vino is more subdued, more velvety, with its neon lights, its bottles and its ornate chandeliers that I would gladly bring home with me.

The whole point was to bring together these two atmospheres without blending them together. As soon as you arrive at the site, you choose Pizza or Vino, depending on whether you’re looking for a pizza to share in a lively room or a more cozy dinner. The two places remain linked, but each retains its own personality.

At Pizza, the kitchen really is part of the decor. You can see the dough being worked, the recipes being prepared, and the pizzas coming out of the oven. This is exactly what I wanted to show: the gestures, the movement, and that little hunger that comes before you even open the menu.

A site designed to be a real visit

When I’m looking for a restaurant, I want to see the menu, understand the atmosphere, and book without spending ten minutes searching for the right button. So I thought of the site the way I would use it myself: simple navigation, easy-to-find information, online booking, and click & collect for nights when you’d rather eat your pizza at home.

They’re not necessarily the most impressive details in photos, but they’re the ones that you notice immediately when they’re not working properly. Here, you can order a pizza on your way out of work or book a table at Vino in just a few clicks. It’s simple, and that was exactly the goal.

Finally discovering the restaurants

The funniest thing is that I already knew every page of the website even though I had never set foot in either of the two restaurants. I was missing a few photos, so I arrived with my camera and with a lot of enthusiasm to photograph the places. And, let’s be honest, to finally taste what I had been watching on the screen for weeks.

At Pizza, I quickly went behind the counter to photograph the kitchen, the hands in the dough, and several recipes, including Toto. I love places when they’re really alive: a team working hard, a quick gesture, or a pizza just placed on the worktop tell a much more complete story than a perfectly organized empty room.

The next evening, the atmosphere at Vino completely changed. I loved the facade even before I entered, then the soft light, the bottles and all those colorful vintage lamps. The place is cozy, a bit theatrical without being stuffy, and very pleasant to photograph. I had spent hours working on its pages; discovering it in person allowed me to understand even better what made it so charming.

And of course, we had to try the food

At Pizza, I had a margherita and Greg a regina. The dough was light, with the edges well puffed up like we like them, and especially no feeling of having eaten a brick afterwards — an important detail! The next day at Vino, I chose the gorgonzola gnocchi with fig and walnuts, while Greg had the meatballs. We also shared a platter of cured meats and had red wine. Even if we had to come in for work, we should at least do things properly.

I wrote about both meals in more detail in my article on Pépé Ronchon Pizza and Pépé Ronchon Vino. They are both Italian restaurants, but they suit rather different sorts of evenings.

A project that sums up Minuit d’Orsay rather well

I particularly loved this project because it allowed me to move from web design to photography, then return to the site with a much more precise vision of the places. Above all, I didn’t want to create another interchangeable restaurant website. I wanted people to already sense a little of the Pizza energy or the Vino light before they even walked through the door.

You can find more screens and the entire presentation of the project on the Minuit d’Orsay portfolio. It’s exactly for this kind of adventure that I created the studio: being able to think about the structure of a website in the morning, taking photos in a kitchen in the afternoon, and finishing the day by moving a three-pixel layout detail because, of course, I had seen it.

When you are looking for a restaurant in Paris, what makes you want to book: the photographs, the menu, or the atmosphere suggested by the website?