A South Austin Cajun institution, off a 2000s website
www.evangelinecafe.comEvangeline Café has been serving Cajun and Creole food in South Austin since the early 2000s, with live music most nights. Its website was from roughly the same era. The rebuild had one hard constraint that shaped everything: whatever replaced it had to be maintainable by restaurant staff, during service, without training.
Restaurant websites rot for a predictable reason: the events calendar. A developer builds an admin panel, staff use it twice, then the calendar shows last spring's lineup forever and the whole site starts looking abandoned.
Any CMS was the wrong answer. A busy kitchen is not going to log into a headless content platform to add Thursday's band, and a monthly retainer to have someone else do it is exactly the cost this business didn't want.
Staff edit a spreadsheet — a tool they already use and cannot break in an interesting way. The sheet is published to the web as CSV and the site reads it. No login, no training, no admin panel to maintain.
The calendar fetches server-side at request time to produce the Schema.org event markup search engines need, re-fetches client-side so an edit appears without a redeploy, caches to localStorage, and falls back to a static set if Sheets is unreachable. A spreadsheet is not a highly-available service, so it is treated as one input rather than a dependency.
Published CSV from a spreadsheet is untrusted input: it contains whatever someone typed, including commas inside quoted fields and arbitrary URLs in the link column. The component uses a hand-rolled quoted-CSV parser and a URL sanitiser that allowlists http and https only, so a pasted javascript: URL can't become an XSS vector.
Google reviews are pulled through the Places API and cached at the edge for a week with stale-while-revalidate. The contact form verifies a Cloudflare Turnstile token server-side before sending through Resend.
The parts that were genuinely hard — and how they were solved.
Astro's default origin check had to be disabled: Vercel's edge rewrites the Origin header, which was rejecting the legitimate multipart form post. The config carries an inline explanation of why, plus the compensating control — server-side Turnstile verification, and a site with no cookies or sessions to forge against. A workaround that explains itself is a workaround the next engineer can safely evaluate.
A structured llms.txt fact file — hours, address, menu, phone — sits alongside a robots.txt that names and admits seventeen-plus AI crawlers individually. When someone asks an assistant where to get gumbo in South Austin, the goal is that the assistant has clean facts to answer with.
A Cheerio-based scraper captured the legacy site into structured JSON, and a Sharp pipeline converted the image library to WebP with per-file size reporting. The menu itself was transcribed by hand from photographs of the physical menu, because OCR on a laminated menu is not accurate enough to publish prices from.