Tuned in to pancakes

Some projects take months of planning. This one happened somewhere between two Greek coffees.

On a research trip in Greece, we ended up in the village of Zervochori, at ΤΡΑΝΖΙΣΤΟΡ: a cafe-snack-bar with mint-green walls, flowerpots with faces guarding the entrance and pancakes that personally insult every diet ever invented. There was an Instagram account. There was a phone number on the placemat. There was no website.

A small project, then, with a clear goal: be easier to find, tell people what’s what, and get the menu onto every phone. Without the village losing any of its charm.

On desktop, the homepage is a radio. Scroll down and the needle slides across the dial, the frequency ticks up from 87.5 to 107.9 FM, and every station is a dish: pancakes on 88.1, waffles on 92.5, the club sandwich on 96.7, pizza, milkshakes, and coffee and bar on 105.9.

Between two stations, the picture hangs halfway for a moment. Just like a real radio crackling before it finds the signal, minus the crackle.

It all runs on a handful of lines of JavaScript, no framework. On a phone, or for anyone who’d rather not have things moving on screen, the scene simply becomes a vertical stack of stations. Nobody has to turn their phone sideways to see a waffle.

The café’s house rule became the design’s house rule too: never half-full. If you can still see the plate, it isn’t finished. In practice that means chunky italic headlines with hard shadows, checkerboard trims, crooked photo frames and a radio mascot in sneakers.

The copy got an extra scoop as well. The club sandwich? Three floors, fries underneath, held together by one very optimistic toothpick. The waffles? Two scoops of ice cream is the small one. That’s not a promise, it’s a warning.

Greek for the villagers, English for everyone passing through. One tap on ΕΛ / EN and everything switches along, from the radio stations to the last tsipouro on the menu.

Fun detail: the typeface from the first design turned out not to know a single Greek letter. On a Greek website that’s, let’s say, a bit awkward. So it became Fira Sans and Space Mono, hosted on the site’s own server. No data sent to Google, and every letter where it belongs.

The full menu lives online: from the ‘Transistor’ pancake to the Porn Star Martini, with prices, descriptions and in both languages. A QR code opens it straight on your phone. No PDF to pinch-zoom, no app, no hassle.

And if the Dubai pancake suddenly turns out to be the hit of the summer? It’s on the menu that same day.

Behind the scenes runs Kirby, our trusted CMS. Prices, opening hours, radio stations, photos and the entire menu: the café edits it all themselves, in Greek. Every station gets a frequency, a colour and a photo; every menu section an emoji and its dishes.

The admin panel speaks the language of whoever uses it. Greek for the café, Dutch for us. So adding a new cocktail doesn’t require a developer in Ghent. (It’s allowed, though. We do pick up.)

A small café in a small village, with a website as loud as its pancakes. Anyone looking for Tranzistor now finds the menu, the number and the opening hours straight away. No searching, no app, and with music.

The directions stayed true to the house style, by the way: follow the road until the road stops caring, then look for the checkered board and the radio with legs. And right at the bottom it says Launched by Major Tom. Naturally.

Stay tuned.

What we delivered

• Concept and web design in the style of a 1960s diner

• Bilingual website: Greek and English

• Scroll scene as a radio dial on desktop, vertical version on mobile

• The full menu online, editable section by section

• A QR code that opens the menu instantly

• Kirby CMS with an admin panel in Greek

• Typefaces with Greek letters, hosted on the site’s own server

• Launched during a research trip in Greece