AliNihari

AliNihari has served Pakistani food in Chicago since 1996. The food had a following, but online they were hard to find and harder to book for catering — the phone number was buried at the bottom of the page and that was about it. They came to North Shore Labs for a site that turns interest into actual inquiries.

We built AliNihari a custom site around the food and the catering business. The menu is laid out clearly with photos you can open and browse, and the story of the restaurant is front and center. For anyone who wants to order delivery, the site links straight out to DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub.

The centerpiece is the catering flow. We built a step-by-step catering request that walks a customer through their event: the date and time, the guest count, delivery or pickup, the dishes they want, and any live stations or add-ons — then their contact details. When they submit, the request goes straight to the restaurant's inbox and the customer gets a confirmation email back with their details. It's built as a quote request, not a checkout: AliNihari follows up with a custom quote, which is how catering actually gets priced. We built custom date and time pickers into it and hold a couple of days' lead time so the kitchen isn't caught out.

We structured the site so Google and AI answers can pull the right details about the restaurant — the address, the hours, the cuisine, the menu — using structured data built for exactly that. Increasingly, customers ask an AI where to eat or cater from, and this is what lets AliNihari show up with the right information.

We put real work into speed and security under the hood: the images are served in modern formats and sized for each device, the code is split so pages load only what they need, and the site ships with a full set of security headers and long-term caching. It's built to hit the best-practice marks for performance.

Catering inquiries climbed after launch — AliNihari went from about one catering form submission a month to eleven.