Hogsalt Hospitality
Hogsalt Hospitality
Hogsalt is a Chicago restaurant group with a reputation that tends to arrive before you do. It started in 2010 with Gilt Bar in River North and has grown into more than 25 restaurants across four cities, including Au Cheval, Bavette's, Green Street Smoked Meats, Doughnut Vault, and Trivoli Tavern, plus La Renommée in Paris.
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Every Hogsalt concept has its own personality. A chandelier-lit doughnut shop. A moody, French-leaning steakhouse. A lively neighborhood tavern with something to notice in every corner. They share a sensibility (quirky, beautiful, a little mischievous), but none of them look alike, and that's the whole point.
Hogsalt's marketing team, led by Kate Rettker, came to WOTW to rebuild the websites for 16 of those restaurants and to create a central corporate home that could hold them all. For a group whose dining rooms are this considered, the website is the front door. Each one needed to feel that way.
Our task
Every site needed to feel as considered as the restaurant it represents. That meant navigation guests never have to think about, enticing photography front and center, and a nostalgic warmth that carries across the whole portfolio, all without flattening sixteen distinct brands into one template.
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The audiences were as varied as the restaurants: diners booking a table tonight, guests planning a private event, gift card buyers, and (at the corporate level) anyone discovering the Hogsalt group as a whole. At Bavette's, that list doubled, with Chicago regulars on one side and Las Vegas visitors at Park MGM on the other.
"Phenomenal. The team went above and beyond to create something beautiful, user-friendly and tailored to our needs."
— NAMI Chicago
Our process & approach
The full engagement ran as a single Plus sprint, July 22 to August 9, 2024, with Dani Boren managing the project and Shelly Morse leading development. The approach: a shared Squarespace foundation underneath, and a completely individual identity on top of every site.
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Bavette's Bar & Boeuf was the most architecturally complex build of the group. Two locations, two reservation systems, two menus, and two guest audiences had to live inside one unified brand. We split the site by location from the moment a visitor lands: a full-bleed landing page routes guests to Chicago or Las Vegas, and each city gets its own homepage, About page, Food & Drink section, Private Dining page, and Gift Cards page. Navigation, integrations, and contact details all shift with the location.
The rest of the portfolio got the same level of attention, tuned to each room. Doughnut Vault leans playful, with quirky type and illustrations that have real personality. Trivoli Tavern opens with a large scrolling logo, keeps things moving with a marquee of images, and hides illustrations throughout for anyone paying attention. La Renommée, Hogsalt's Parisian concept, is all old-world atmosphere: soft pink accents, playful animation, rich photography, and a wine menu worth lingering over.
Hogsalt.com ties it together. The corporate site gives the group a central home to showcase every concept, so each restaurant keeps its own voice while the portfolio reads as one family.
The outcome
Hogsalt now has sixteen restaurant sites that each feel like their own room, plus a corporate home that finally shows the full portfolio in one place.
Inside WOTW, the engagement has become a reference point. Of all sixteen builds, Bavette's is the one the team points to first when someone asks what we can do on Squarespace.
Features & Integrations
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Resy, Tock, and Tripleseat
Bavette's Chicago uses a custom Resy embed for reservations and Tock for order-ahead, with private dining inquiries handled through an embedded Tripleseat form. Las Vegas links out to MGM Resorts for reservations and routes group dining to the Park MGM team directly.
Location-split architecture
Bavette's runs as two sites in one. The landing page sends guests to Chicago or Las Vegas, and everything downstream, from reservations to private dining contacts, follows that choice.
Interactive menus
Instead of static PDFs, the Bavette's menus are full pages with photo carousels, tabbed categories (Dinner, Vegetarian, Cocktails, Dessert, Wines & Spirits), and a jump-link wine list organized by section. PDF downloads sit alongside each page for guests who want them.
Menus the team runs themselves
Doughnut Vault's menus are built to be dynamic, so the Hogsalt team can swap items in and out whenever the case changes. No ticket to WOTW required.
Motion and hidden details
Animated logos on entry, Trivoli Tavern's scrolling logo and image marquee, La Renommée's playful animations, and illustrations tucked throughout. Hospitality has always lived in the details people discover on their own. We built the sites to work the same way.
Custom illustration and type
Bavette's features custom dessert illustrations, Engravers MT Bold display headings, a warm cream type palette over deep backgrounds, and photography treated with intentional gradients rather than flat overlays. The result feels like the dining room: considered, confident, a little dramatic.
