Best Asian Restaurant Website Design: 5 Real Examples
Most "best restaurant website design" lists are screenshot galleries — pretty pictures with no idea whether those sites actually bring in customers. This list is different: I designed and built every site on it, for real restaurants in and around Los Angeles, and I know exactly what each one was built to do and what happened after launch. Five Asian restaurants — ramen, Korean BBQ, sushi, Korean home cooking — each with a different problem, and the design decision that solved it.
One thing to know upfront: a restaurant website is its own discipline. Your customer is often standing on a sidewalk, hungry, on a phone with two bars of signal, deciding between you and the place next door. Every decision below — menus as real code instead of PDFs, load speed, one-tap directions — comes from that moment.
1. Akatora — the new ramen shop that took #1 on Google
Akatora opened in Koreatown with the hardest starting position in local search: zero online presence, in one of LA's most competitive food neighborhoods, against ramen shops with years of Google history. The site had to earn everything through structure: a fully custom interactive menu — real text and photos, not a PDF — so Google can read every dish; local structured data aimed at Koreatown ramen searches; and a bold design that matches the room's energy.
The result: the #1 Google result for "Ramen in Koreatown" (verified July 2026), from a standing start. The takeaway for any restaurant owner: your menu is your most searched-for content. If it lives in a scanned PDF, Google mostly can't read it — and neither can a customer pinch-zooming on a sidewalk.
2. San Mountain BBQ — 50 years of heritage, finally visible online
San Mountain has served Korean BBQ since 1974 — LA's oldest Korean restaurant — but that heritage never came through online, where modern customers now search before choosing a Korean BBQ spot. The design brief was the opposite of Akatora's: don't reinvent, translate. The site leads with a full-screen walkthrough film of the room and the meat hitting the grill, and the typography and palette carry the weight of a 50-year institution rather than chasing trends.
Today the site sits top 3 on Google for "Korean BBQ Koreatown" — and just as important, it finally feels like the restaurant. The takeaway: heritage is a design asset, not a liability. If your restaurant has history, the worst thing a designer can do is make it look like everyone else's 2026 template.
3. Gomen Ramen — specificity wins search
Gomen isn't "a ramen restaurant" — it's authentic Wakayama-style ramen in Stanton, and the entire site is built around saying exactly that. That specificity is a search strategy: "ramen near me" is a knife fight, but a site that clearly explains what Wakayama style is, in text Google can read, owns its niche. The build is deliberately clean and fast — it audits a perfect 100 in all four Google Lighthouse categories — because a small restaurant's site has one job on a phone: menu, hours, directions, now.
Gomen now appears on the first page of Google for its searches. The takeaway: "authentic," "family-owned," "traditional" are wallpaper words — every restaurant claims them. Name the region, the style, the dish. Specific text wins specific searches, and specific searches are the ones hungry people make.
4. Kiraku — a 1986 neighborhood institution, newly findable
Kiraku has been Gardena's neighborhood ramen and sushi house since 1986 — the kind of place regulars love and newcomers can't find. Its new site is intentionally quiet: warm photography, the menu front and center, hours and directions one tap away, and another perfect 100/100/100/100 Lighthouse audit. No gimmicks, because a neighborhood restaurant that has been at it since 1986 doesn't need to shout — it needs to be findable and legible.
The takeaway: match the design's volume to the restaurant's personality. A hype-driven opening needs energy on screen; a beloved institution needs clarity, warmth, and speed. Both are design — knowing which one your restaurant needs is the actual skill.
5. Jip Bap — bilingual done properly, not machine-translated
Jip Bap serves Korean home cooking in Sherman Oaks, to two audiences at once: Korean speakers who want 집밥 to mean what it means, and English speakers discovering it. The site launched fully bilingual — not a translate widget, but two versions written for how each audience actually reads and searches. That matters technically too: done correctly, each language is separately indexable, so the restaurant can appear in both English and Korean searches. The build audits 97/100/100/100 on Lighthouse.
The takeaway for any restaurant serving an immigrant community and its neighbors: a translate button treats your second language as an afterthought, and both your customers and Google can tell. Two properly built languages are two doors into the same restaurant.
What the five have in common
Different restaurants, different personalities — but under the design, the same engineering checklist every time:
- The menu is real, readable text — never a PDF. Customers browse it with a thumb; Google indexes every dish.
- Built for the sidewalk moment: menu, hours, and one-tap directions reachable in seconds on a phone.
- Fast on weak cellular — speed is measured, not guessed: four of these five sites audit 97 or above in every Google Lighthouse category. Slow sites lose hungry customers to the place next door.
- Local SEO structure, so Google knows exactly what the restaurant serves and where it is.
- Photography that makes people hungry — because ranking gets the click, but appetite gets the visit.
- Custom code, no templates — it's what makes all of the above possible at once.
Every site above is live — tap through them, on your phone, the way a customer would. If your restaurant's website wouldn't survive that comparison, that's fixable. Send me your site and I'll tell you honestly what it would take, at launch and after.
Free ConsultationFind this useful? See more of brian-yang.com in your Google Search and AI results.
Add to preferred sources on Google