Meal Cage (Restaurant)

A restaurant taking orders by phone loses them at the exact moment it can least afford to — peak service, when the line is busy and the kitchen is loudest. Orders taken by ear get written down wrong, and once the call ends there is no record to check against.

The menu also changes. A printed or hardcoded one goes stale the day a dish is dropped, and a customer ordering something unavailable is a refund and a complaint rather than a sale.

Built the React and Tailwind front end: menu browsing and filtering, the cart, the order flow and the authenticated area where a customer sees what they ordered before.

Cart state is persisted rather than held in memory. Losing a half-built order to an accidental refresh is the fastest way to lose the customer, and on mobile — where most food ordering happens — a backgrounded tab being reclaimed is routine rather than exceptional.

The menu is fully browsable without an account. Asking someone to register before they have seen what is on offer is a conversion problem, so authentication is deferred to checkout, where the customer already has a reason to create one.

Categories filter client-side against data already fetched, because a menu is small enough to hold entirely and a round trip per category tap would make browsing feel slower than a paper menu.

Shipped as a working restaurant ordering site — menu, cart, checkout and order history behind one account.