HudRest

The problem

People decide where to eat online before they leave home. In a YouGov poll for Wix, 41% said they check menus online to see what a meal will cost, and a third said the most irritating thing is finding no menu at all (source). Most independent restaurants don't have a site they can keep up to date, let alone in several languages for tourists, so they lean on booking marketplaces that charge for every guest they send and keep the relationship with the diner.

What I built

I built HudRest on my own, from a Firebase prototype to the current product.

• Menu from a photo. The owner photographs the menu and AI (Gemini) turns it into a digital menu, translated into Portuguese, English, Spanish and French.
• A website per restaurant. Each restaurant gets its own site on a subdomain or its own domain, edited in a visual builder, with SEO, reviews and a showroom.
• Direct bookings. Guests book on the restaurant's own site, with no commission, whether it's 10 bookings or 1,000.
• Run it from WhatsApp. Owners update the menu, availability and the dish of the day by message.
• Three surfaces. The public site, the owner's dashboard, and a back office where we build demo sites for leads.

Under the hood: Next.js, Postgres with Drizzle, Better Auth, Stripe subscriptions, Cloudflare R2, and Dokploy on a VPS provisioning subdomains and custom domains. Flows are covered by Playwright and contract tests, and decisions are written down as ADRs.

Result

HudRest is live in Portugal with a single plan at €9.99 a week, everything included. A restaurant gets a site, a translated menu and its own bookings for a fixed price instead of a fee per guest.