Addis Ethiopian Restaurant · Restaurant · Hospitality
Two cuisines. One checkout. Zero commission.
- Client
- Addis Ethiopian Restaurant
- Industry
- Restaurant · Hospitality
- Services
- Web Design · Branding · SEO
- Timeline
- Pre-launch · build complete
Addis Ethiopian Restaurant is a Mount Vernon hidden gem at 316 Park Avenue, Baltimore, serving authentic Ethiopian cooking and Charm City comfort food from one kitchen. We built a custom commerce storefront that takes orders directly: menu → cart → checkout → tracking, with own-driver delivery, dine-in reservations, and Clover-unified payments and kitchen tickets. The restaurant keeps the customer and the margin the delivery apps used to take.
01
The Challenge
Addis lived entirely on aggregators. DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats took 20–30% on every order and owned the customer relationship, while auto-generated microsites outranked any property the restaurant actually owned. Search for it by name and you found a middleman, not the kitchen.
The kitchen serves two cuisines under one roof: Ethiopian classics like Doro Wot and Kitfo alongside Baltimore favorites like Old Bay wings, smash burgers, and the Addis Whopper. No off-the-shelf ordering template handles a split identity like that, and a $21.99 Doro Wot only reads as fair on a site that looks the part.
02
What We Did
First-party ordering on their own domain
A full carryout-and-delivery flow the restaurant owns end to end: photo-forward menu, one-click add to cart, live cart, and a checkout with tax, tip, and promo codes. Card payment tokenizes through Clover's iframe and the order pushes straight to the in-store POS and kitchen, so there's no aggregator cut and no second system to reconcile.
One kitchen, two soul foods, one menu UX
A live HTML menu (never a PDF) with a sticky dual-cuisine anchor nav, Ethiopian Kitchen and Baltimore Favorites each given their own space. Spice, vegan, and signature tags on every card, English plus transliterations on the Ethiopian dishes, and the most-loved plates merchandised up top.
Own-driver delivery, priced by real distance
Address entry at checkout runs the real road distance and maps it to flat tiers ($3.99 / $5.99 / $7.99), gated at 12 miles with the fee shown before payment. Orders hand off to the restaurant's own driver, and customers follow a status tracker from received to in the kitchen to ready or out for delivery.
A promotions engine that knows the schedule
A daily cron checks the Ravens and Orioles schedules and fires game-day specials automatically (Camden Yards is a mile away), on top of owner-created codes and automatic promos. Dine-in reservations and game-day catering inquiries are built in, all in the restaurant's terracotta, forest, and cream brand.
03
The Work
04
By the Numbers
- 20–30% per order0% (first-party)
- Aggregator commission
- Aggregator apps onlyCarryout + own-driver delivery, direct
- Online ordering
- Separate aggregator stackClover-unified checkout + POS
- Payments + kitchen
- Manual or noneAuto on every Ravens & Orioles game
- Game-day promotions
Credits
- Strategy + Build: ADesign
- Commerce: Next.js storefront + Clover (payments, kitchen, tax)
- Delivery: distance-tiered fees + own-driver hand-off
- Brand: extended from the restaurant's identity (terracotta · forest · cream)