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Reusable engine
A full restaurant platform — public site out front, a complete back-office behind it, with an AI assistant trained on the restaurant's own data.
Visit the live site — johnbsbarbecue.comJohn runs a barbecue joint — great food, loyal regulars. Online, all he had was a single GoDaddy page he wasn't happy with.
He stopped in while I was heads-down building Nation.Tattoo, saw what I was working on, and asked if I could help with his site. My plate was already full — but I figured, what the heck, it'd be fun. So I sat down and told the AI everything I'd want if I owned a barbecue place… and then kept adding to it. It grew into the full platform it is today.
Out front: an online menu with daily specials and sold-out flags, a catering request inbox, customer reviews, an email newsletter, and a loyalty members portal. Behind the counter: a register with payment links (Square/Venmo/PayPal/Zelle), sales, expenses and bills tracking, inventory with low-stock alerts, a time clock, team management, and a full email client inside the admin.
The standout is "BBQ Brain" — an AI assistant that drafts posts, answers questions and helps run the place using the restaurant's own menu, inventory and info — not generic boilerplate.
Hand-built in PHP and MySQL — no page-builder, no framework, no monthly platform. Just feature after feature until it did everything a small barbecue business could need. Full restaurant SEO with LocalBusiness, Menu, Review and AggregateRating structured data so Google can show ratings and menu info right in the results.
This is the build that started a chain reaction. One of John's own customers — a welder named Dan — saw this site and asked for one of his own. That became the next project.