When DoorDash acquired Caviar, the premium restaurant delivery service, it took on Caviar’s codebase too. Merging two stacks takes longer than anyone wants. The restaurant pages still had to be live in the meantime.
The situation
Caviar’s restaurant pages ran on Caviar’s code. DoorDash’s engineers were moving that code onto DoorDash’s stack, and more than 250 restaurant pages sat in the middle of the migration.
They couldn’t go dark, and they couldn’t wait on the rebuild. DoorDash needed a site that could go up in a week, hold every restaurant, look like Caviar, and come down once engineering caught up.
The work
We built the interim site on Squarespace, which went up fast and kept the work off engineering’s plate.
We started with one restaurant page: layout, banner photo, menu, and ordering details. Once that template was right, we duplicated it and filled it in, restaurant by restaurant and location by location, from Aburaya to XLB Chinese, 250 times over.
An index page pulled them together under one line: discover the best restaurants.
The same engagement included a rebuild of trycaviar.com, Caviar’s public site, in about a week and a half. Figma came first, to lock the layout and concept. Then we built it in Squarespace, with micro-animations that run smoothly on every transition.
The outcome
The interim site held every restaurant through the migration and has since come down. trycaviar.com has moved to a custom build inside DoorDash.