A restaurant with loyal regulars, no digital presence, and no way to take a pickup order. I designed and shipped its first website, ordering experience, and payment workflow in seven days.
Live SiteBackground
TRECE Friendly Food is a restaurant operating inside a CrossFit gym in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The brand and name belong entirely to the business, and I came in as their first and only designer.
When I approached them, the restaurant was effectively invisible to anyone outside the gym. No website. No Google presence. No findable phone number. Their only digital touchpoint was an Instagram account, and their primary customer base was gym members who happened to walk past. They had just signed up for DoorDash while I was building the site, but DoorDash alone wasn't the right answer.
Discovery
Before touching any design tool, I sat down with the owners and worked through a targeted set of questions:
The answers gave me a clear picture of three interconnected gaps, and one critical constraint I needed to design around.
The Problems
The Insight
The right solution had to be designed for how people in Puerto Rico actually behave, not how a generic e-commerce template assumes they do.
ATH Móvil is Puerto Rico's dominant peer-to-peer payment platform. It's what locals use to pay each other, split bills, and transact with small businesses. It's trusted, familiar, and instant.
WhatsApp is equally ubiquitous, and it's how Puerto Ricans communicate both personally and professionally. It is not a niche channel here. It is the channel.
Combining both created an ordering workflow native to the community, not imported from somewhere else.
Design Exploration
Before building, I used Google Stitch to rapidly explore design directions with the TRECE team. The iterations ranged from a luxury wellness aesthetic to a more editorial, food-forward approach, including bilingual versions in both English and Spanish. This phase let us align on visual direction quickly without committing to code.
Design directions explored in Google Stitch, spanning aesthetic and bilingual variations
The Workflow
The site surfaces two ordering options immediately and equally on the homepage: DoorDash for delivery, and a custom pickup flow for local customers.
DoorDash is available from the first screen, primarily used by tourists and customers who prefer standard delivery. It links out to the existing DoorDash integration.
The pickup flow is where the design work lives. When a customer clicks "Ordenar Pickup" or starts adding items from the menu:
What Was Built
On Timeline
Discovery, design, development, and launch completed in one week. AI tools were used deliberately to compress development cycles, not to skip thinking, but to spend more of it on the workflow design and less on boilerplate.
Reflection
TRECE had everything it needed to succeed: a kitchen, a location, and regulars who already liked the food. What it lacked was infrastructure. This project was about building that infrastructure as quickly as possible, using the right tools for the right community.