Mad Cucumber VEGAN lounge

The challenge

Small independent places often get photographed badly, with flat overhead shots and cold light that make the food look like a menu instead of a meal.

That's a shame for somewhere like Mad Cucumber, where the whole appeal is that it feels homemade, and that kind of photo loses it.

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.

Fede, off duty.

Pulling espresso.

Bringing a plate out.

For the website, before designing anything I walked round and photographed the room itself, the greens, the deep purple and the paper menus, and took the colours from those photos. That's why the site looks like the café.

The site, desktop.

The custom cakes section, mobile.

Designed and built it in Webflow. Still developing it.

Gallery

Savoury

Sweet