Roma

Roma is a small Italian restaurant in Rochester’s Corn Hill neighborhood. The pasta is made in house from Italian-imported flour, the gelato changes weekly, and you order at the counter. It is open three evenings a week and it does not pretend otherwise.

The restaurant’s charm is that it does not fuss, so the site does not either. The headline names whatever is on the plate beside it, Detroit pizza one moment and homemade gelato the next, and when the Peroni comes around the second line changes with it: come thirsty. The hours and the address sit right under the first button. There is no reservation system to manage because there are no reservations to take.

The menu is the part most restaurant sites get wrong, usually by hiding it in a PDF. Here it lives on the page, set in the same type as everything else, floating over photographs of the dining room and the pasta itself. A visitor can go from the headline to knowing what the Italian Wedding soup costs in two scrolls. That is the whole site, and for a place like Roma it is exactly enough.