Fabrizio's Italian Kitchen

Fabrizio cooks Northern Italian food from his home region of Lombardy, near Lake Como, for diners in Central Oregon. The menu changes often: a dish runs out, a special goes up for the weekend, a new recipe gets added. A small restaurant usually handles that by logging in to a website builder it's paying for every month, or by asking a web developer and waiting. The owners aren't technical, and I live in a different city, so I didn't want to be the person they had to ask.

I designed and built the website, and I kept the menu out of the page itself. The whole menu lives in one small data file: each dish's name, its Italian name, a one-line description, a price, and whether it's on today. Specials carry an end date, so a weekend special takes itself down after Sunday and nobody has to remember.

Then I set up Claude on the restaurant's Mac with written instructions that say exactly what it may change and how. It edits only the menu file unless they ask for something else, never makes up a price or an ingredient, and never publishes without a yes. The site builds from the owner's own repository on the owner's own Cloudflare account, so the code and the hosting are theirs.

How an update works

1. Fabrizio opens the Claude chat for the website, on his Mac or on his phone, and says what changed: a new dish, its description and its price.
2. Claude updates the menu, checks it, and shows him the menu as diners will see it, in plain text.
3. He says yes. About 30 seconds later the change is on the live site, where he can look at it.
4. If it was only a test, or something's wrong, he asks Claude to undo it.

Fabrizio has tested it himself, adding dishes by talking to Claude, and usually he keeps the change as it went up. The restaurant gets an up-to-date menu without a website platform or a developer in the middle of every change, and the owner can do it in his own words, in the time it takes to send a message.

For a small business, this is a practical use of AI. The owner knows what changed, and a minute later the website shows it, with nobody in between.