Bistro — Brussels · 2026

Bar'Botte

Bilingual (NL/FR) restaurant site with menu and reservations. Cottage's little sister, its own identity.

The real site. Click to open it large and live — click around, you stay here.

The brief

The Brussels audience is both NL and FR. The previous site was Dutch-only and missed a large part of the neighbourhood.

The solution

Fully bilingual site with language switching, shared admin with Cottage (same kitchen, different identity), and a reservation form that emails the venue directly.

Result

NL/FR translations via shared admin
Own identity, shared backend
Reservations confirmed within a day

Bar'Botte is Cottage's smaller sister venue, in Waregem. Its location close to the language border also brings in French-speaking guests — an NL-only site literally left part of the potential guests aside. At the same time it couldn't become double management: same kitchen, different identity.

In numbers

Languages

2 (NL/FR)

before: 1 (NL)

Management systems

shared

before: separate from Cottage

Edit menu & events

self, in min

before: via webdev

Key decisions

Shared backend, separate skin

Cottage and Bar'Botte share one admin but each show their own identity. Manage once, serve two venues.

FR not as an afterthought

The French version isn't a button in a corner but a full route with its own SEO. Near the language border people search in both languages.

Self-manage menu & events

No reservations — but an own admin where the venue updates the menu and events itself in minutes. No webdev invoice per change.

Timeline

Week 1 — Identity
Define what sets Bar'Botte apart from Cottage within one system.
Week 2 — i18n architecture
NL/FR routes, language detection, hreflang set up correctly.
Week 3 — Build
Shared admin extended with menu & events management, translatable content.
Week 4 — Launch
Live in both languages, menu & events tested end-to-end.

What I'd redo

I first underestimated how much content truly had to be bilingual versus merely translated. Some phrasings don't carry over 1-to-1 between NL and FR. Next time I'll plan a short copy pass per language from day one, not as post-processing.

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