Mad Cucumber VEGAN lounge

The challenge

Small independents get photographed badly. Flat overhead shots, cold light, food that looks like a menu rather than a meal.

Which is the wrong way round for a place like Mad Cucumber, where the entire appeal is that it feels made by hand. Most food photography irons exactly that out.

The idea

Photograph the room, then build the website out of it.

The work

Mad Cucumber's part of my hometown, and I just really like the place, so I'd go in every so often on a weekend, unpaid, and photograph the food as it came out of the kitchen. They didn't have the capacity to cook everything at once, so it was low and slow: a dish would come out, I'd shoot it, sometimes I'd just stay for a coffee.

The photos were originally for their Uber Eats listing, which is why there are so many of them. A delivery menu needs a shot of everything. They ended up on the Webflow site too. They run their own online ordering separately, on their own system.

I shot the food, the staff, and Fede, who runs it. The photos that make it feel like somewhere you'd actually sit are the ones with people in.

Then the website. Before designing anything I walked round the restaurant and photographed the room itself, not the food, the space. The greens, the deep purple, the paper menus. I pulled the palette out of the place rather than off a swatch, which is why the site looks like the café and not a restaurant template.

Designed and built it in Webflow. Still developing it.

Gallery

Savoury

Sweet