Syrovarnya

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Web

Farm-to-Table
Own Cheese Production
Multi-Location Chain
Delivery Platform
Franchising
Table Reservations
Farm-to-Table
Own Cheese Production
Multi-Location Chain
Delivery Platform
Franchising
Table Reservations
The Brief

A restaurant chain
that grew
one request at a time

Syrovarnya is a Novikov Group restaurant concept rooted in rustic farmhouse cooking, with in-house soft-cheese production at the heart of the menu. The format proved scalable, and a single dining room grew into a chain operating across several Russian cities.

The website did not grow with it. It was built for one venue: a homepage, a menu and a reservation form. Two shifts exposed its limits. Lockdown turned delivery from a secondary feature into a core business channel almost overnight. At the same time, a growing base of regulars kept raising two needs the site could not meet: browsing the full menu before booking, and quickly finding the right location among many.

Client
Syrovarnya, Novikov Group. Farmhouse cuisine and its own cheese production. Multiple Russian cities.
Deliverables
Homepage · Full Menu · Delivery Ordering · Restaurant Locator · Franchising · Reservations
Challenge
Grow a single-location homepage into a clear, multi-destination site: menu, delivery, locations, and franchising, each with its own place, none of it dumped into a single overloaded nav bar
My Contribution
Navigation architecture and visual concept, from brief to final screens
The Concept

Not a template.
A point of view.
Built from a brief.

01. Origin

Farmhouse texture as visual language

The concept starts with the restaurant's own cheese production: hand-drawn, cross-hatched illustration in the style of a farmer's ledger, rustic paper texture, and dish photography treated as the hero rather than as decoration. The site is designed so no page feels like a chain outlet. Every page should feel like the original dining room, wherever it is opened.

02. Accent

One colour, used precisely

Sunny Gold is the single accent across the entire system: the brand mark, the "Reserve a Table" action, price highlights, and active navigation states. Everywhere else, the palette stays close to cream and rye brown, so gold reads as a signal for one thing only: a decision point.

03. Tension

One chain, one navigation, growing fast

As Syrovarnya added cities, the navigation had a real risk of fragmenting into a wall of tabs: one per location, one per new request. The concept holds that line instead. Three clear top level destinations carry the whole product, with location picking folded into delivery and reservations rather than turned into a maze of its own.

Design Philosophy

"The moment a restaurant becomes five restaurants, the menu is not the hard part. The navigation is."

Syrovarnya delivery menu, cart and reservation screens
Central Concept: Information Architecture

Three doors,
not thirty

Syrovarnya did not ask for a redesign. It asked for delivery, fast, because lockdown had just made the dining room the least reliable way to reach a customer. That request landed first and shaped everything that followed. Delivery became a top level destination, not a banner bolted onto the homepage.

What followed was not a plan so much as a pattern of requests. Regulars wanted to browse the full menu before they booked, not request a PDF. Customers in other cities wanted to confirm which Syrovarnya was theirs before they picked up the phone. Rather than answering each with a new tab, both needs were folded into the destinations already in place. Menu gained depth, and Delivery gained a city and location picker.

Franchising came last, once the chain itself became a story worth telling on its own: a third door, for people who wanted to open a Syrovarnya rather than eat at one.

Menu, Delivery, Franchising: three destinations, not one per feature
Visual System
Rye Black #313130
Sunny Gold #E8B23F
Farmhouse Cream #DAD5CA
White #FCFAF5
Cellar #2B2018
Display: headings and dish names
Farmhouse
Vinaigrette
DM Serif Display. Warm and food editorial. Used for all dish names and section headers, carrying the same handmade quality as the cheese illustrations.
UI: navigation, labels and price
MENU · DELIVERY · FRANCHISING
450 ₽
Baked sweet potato with avocado mousse, farmhouse sour cream
DM Sans. Neutral and precise, with wide tracking in uppercase UI elements and a light weight for body copy, so the interface never competes with dish photography.
Decorative Texture: Farmhouse Layer
Wood grain, for table and shelving
Cheese rind cross section
Kraft paper, for menu backing
Stitched hem, for packaging trim
The Screens
01 Homepage: Delivery, Reservations and Locations Desktop
Syrovarnya homepage with delivery, reservations and a city picker

The three top level destinations, Доставка (Delivery), Резерв стола (Reserve a Table), and a city picker spanning Moscow to Rostov on Don, sit in the same header at the same visual weight. No destination reads as an afterthought to another.

02 Delivery Menu, Cart and Reservation Mobile

On mobile, ordering and booking share the same visual grammar, so moving between them never feels like leaving the site. The delivery menu is browsable with a running cart, and the reservation flow leads with the room itself: photo, hours, and a one tap route, before it ever asks for a date.

Delivery menu, cart, and table reservation mobile screens

A delivery menu with per-dish weight and price, a persistent cart with running total, and on the same trip, restaurant contacts, hours, and a "Reserve a Table" action that never competes with checkout.

Design Decisions
01
Delivery earned
a top-level tab
Lockdown did not get a banner or a popup. It got the same navigation weight as Menu and Reservations. Treating delivery as core product rather than emergency infrastructure meant the site required no second redesign once the dining rooms reopened.
02
The menu grew depth,
not a new tab
When regulars asked to browse dishes before booking, the answer was not a fourth navigation item. It was a fuller Menu page, with photography, price, and portion for every dish. The destination stayed the same. The destination simply got better.
03
One accent colour,
used sparingly
Sunny Gold appears exactly where a decision is being made: "Reserve a Table," the delivery total, and the active tab. Everywhere else, the interface stays in cream and rye, so gold reads as an action, never as branding for its own sake.
04
Franchising got
its own door
Once Syrovarnya was a chain across multiple cities, "how do I open one" became a real, recurring question, distinct enough from "where do I eat" to earn a third top level destination rather than a paragraph on an About page.
🧀
This is what I do

Concept first.
Navigation always.
Brief to screens.