The new project at beterdesign is a Louisiana-style seafood boil restaurant in East London. The Cajun Boil. And the way this one came together — across two cities, with a partnership we’ve wanted to formalize for a long time — is worth a blog post of its own.
The restaurant
The Cajun Boil sits in East London and serves what most British restaurants can’t — a proper Louisiana seafood boil. Crawfish, shrimp, crab, corn, potatoes, andouille sausage, the whole table covered in butcher paper, no cutlery in sight. It’s a category of restaurant that lives or dies on personality. The food is loud. The brand has to match.
The old site didn’t. It was functional in the way most restaurant sites are functional — a menu, an address, a reservation widget, a few photos that did the food no favors. None of it captured the feeling of actually being there, hands deep in a pile of crawfish, paper towels in stacks, a Sazerac in the other hand.
The partnership
We’re not doing this one alone. This project is the first formal collaboration between beterdesign and a UX team in London — a small group of women whose work we’ve admired for a while, and whose strengths complement ours almost too neatly. They lead the user research, the strategy, and the prototyping. We lead the visual design, the brand work, and the Webflow build.
It’s the kind of partnership that doesn’t happen often — two studios in two cities, two skill sets that don’t overlap, working on the same project from day one. Most agency collaborations are subcontracting in disguise. This isn’t. It’s a real one.
What we’re building
The new site has to do three things at once — and pull it off without feeling busy:
- Make the food the hero. Photography that earns its place. No stock plates. No moody shots that hide what’s on the table.
- Make booking obvious. Most restaurant sites bury reservations behind two clicks and a popup. We’re putting it where a hungry person on their phone can find it without looking.
- Carry the personality of the place. The Cajun Boil isn’t a fine-dining restaurant. The site shouldn’t feel like one. It should feel like the room — loud where it needs to be, generous, a little messy in the best way.
Why this is a different kind of project for us
Most of the work beterdesign has done lately is in luxury — private aviation, luxury travel, real estate brokerages. Quiet sites. Restrained typography. White space as a brand decision.
The Cajun Boil is the opposite. The brief is to make some noise. The food is the noise, the room is the noise, and the site has to be the noise too. That’s a different kind of design problem, and we’re here for it.
Restraint is a tool, not a religion. The right site for the right brand. For Beth Keyse, that meant quiet. For The Cajun Boil, it means the exact opposite — and that’s the point.
What’s next
The site is in design now. We’ll write a proper case study when it ships. Until then — if you’re in East London, eat there. The food is the brief.
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