Taiwan Tapas is a family restaurant that has earned its 4.7-star reputation the hard way — through lockdowns, hygiene rules, and the ordinary grind of running a small business. I built and maintain its website, and the brief was the one most small businesses actually have: be fast, be findable, and don’t require a developer to keep the lights on. The site now draws around 200 visitors a day, which is a lot for a single-location restaurant.
Hosting: Gatsby and Netlify
The stack is Gatsby for the static site and Netlify for hosting and deploys, paired with the obvious listings on Google and TripAdvisor. Static generation keeps the site quick and cheap to serve, and Netlify’s deploy flow is about as frictionless as it gets. For a content-light, performance-sensitive site like this, it is hard to beat.
The domain and SSL trap
The one real scar from this project was domains. Hosting several domains that lived with different registrars meant managing SSL certificates across providers, and that turned out to be brittle in exactly the place you least want surprises: a customer-facing site.
Consolidate domains under one provider before you go live. Cross-provider SSL is a problem you only enjoy solving once.
If I started over, the choice of Gatsby and Netlify would be the same — but every domain would sit under the Netlify umbrella from day one.
Why Tailwind earned its place
I was skeptical of Tailwind CSS going in. A utility-first abstraction looked like inline styles with extra steps. Building this site changed my mind:
- Speed: it makes prototyping and iteration genuinely fast, the upside of inline styles without the maintainability cost.
- Co-location: keeping styles next to markup fits how React and Vue components already work — a cleaner alternative to CSS-in-JS or separate modules.
- Lean output: tree-shaking at build time ships only the classes you actually use, so the bundle stays small.
Combined with a proper dark mode, what I expected to dislike became a tool I now reach for.
What I’d keep, what I’d change
Gatsby and Netlify again, without hesitation — but with all domains consolidated under one provider. WordPress is still the right answer when non-technical stakeholders need to own day-to-day content edits; here, Gatsby gave us the control to move fast and keep complexity in check. For a small business, that balance of speed, cost, and maintainability is the whole game.