Restaurant Hugo is a free, MIT-licensed Hugo theme for creating restaurant and food-related websites, designed by Themefisher and developed by Gethugothemes. It produces a static site from Markdown content, with a Bootstrap-based responsive layout and a built-in blog engine.
What is Restaurant Hugo?
Restaurant Hugo is a website theme built on the Hugo static site generator, optimized for restaurants, cafés, and food blogs. It accepts Markdown files as content input and outputs a fast, pre-rendered HTML site that can be hosted on any static host. The theme includes a contact page, newsletter form, image galleries, and a blog section, and it comes pre-configured with Netlify settings for one-click deployment.
Key Features
- Bootstrap-based layout — The template uses Bootstrap for its responsive grid and UI components, so it looks correct on phones, tablets, and desktops without extra work.
- Google Analytics support — Add your tracking ID and get visitor analytics without installing additional plugins.
- CSS and JS bundling with Hugo Pipes — Hugo automatically concatenates and minifies the theme's stylesheets and scripts, reducing the number of requests.
- Netlify settings predefined — A Netlify configuration file is included, which means you can connect the GitHub repo and deploy clicklessly.
- Mailchimp integration — A newsletter sign-up form is built in, ready to be connected to a Mailchimp list for email collection.
- Contact form support — A styled contact form is included; it can be wired to Netlify Forms or a third-party backend.
- Google Page Speed optimized — The demo version reports an 85% performance score on Google PageSpeed Insights, indicating fast loading times.
- Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags — Social sharing previews are automatically set, improving link appearance on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms.
Who is it for?
- Restaurant owners — Launch a professional website with menus, opening hours, location, and a contact form, without hiring a web developer.
- Food bloggers — Publish recipes and food stories in a clean, readable blog layout with image support and sharing features.
- Café and catering businesses — Promote daily specials, events, and booking information on a visually rich site with smooth animations.
- Hugo developers — Use the theme as a project starter; it includes npm scripts for project setup and local development.
What can you do with Restaurant Hugo?
- Restaurant owners: Show menus, display the chef's photos, list opening hours, and accept messages through the contact form, all on a single site.
- Food bloggers: Write and publish recipe posts with categories and tags, and build an email list with the Mailchimp widget.
- Café owners: Create a gallery of meals and drinks using Slick Slider and lightbox effects from Venobox.
- Marketing teams: Update site text and images visually using Sitepins, a Git-based headless CMS that is pre-configured for this theme.
How does Restaurant Hugo work?
Begin by cloning the GitHub repository at github.com/gethugothemes/restaurant-hugo. Run npm run project-setup to initialize the project, then npm run dev to start a local development server. Edit your content in Markdown, then build the static site and deploy it with the included Netlify settings.
License
The code is released under the MIT license, so you are free to use it for personal and commercial projects. The demo images in the repo have their own licenses and should be replaced before going live.
