Case Studies
Five Corners Gets Set for Opening Day With All-in-One Commerce Platform
How an operator preparing to launch a new restaurant onboarded reservations, website, online ordering, and catering all at once.
- Cuisine type:
- Italian
- Locations:
- 1
- Founded:
- 2023
- City:
- Newark, NJ
On the east side of Newark, NJ is a neighborhood called Ironbound: A culinary destination teeming with restaurants that reflect the community’s Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish roots. In early 2023, a group of young partners came together around an idea for putting a new kind of business into the neighborhood.
“Five Corners is going to be the first Italian restaurant in the area,” says Gabe Ribeiro, one of the lead operators of the forthcoming restaurant. “It’s a very modern, youthful restaurant and a brand new vibe for the neighborhood.”
With a pre-opening to-do list a mile long and limited web development experience, Gabe wanted a website and ecommerce platform as easy and modern as what he’d experienced elsewhere in his career.
“I’ve been running a Shopify store for a few years,” he says. “Everything is drag-and-drop easy and centralized. I wanted something similar for the restaurant.
“I knew we needed a reservations platform, online ordering & catering, and a place to host the website. And I was not going to go through four different platforms. I wanted everything in one place.”
After hearing about BentoBox from other restaurateurs, Gabe started seeing it everywhere.
“Usually when I went to websites that I liked, I would scroll down to the bottom, and there it was: Powered by BentoBox.”
BentoBox got his website off to a quick start.
“I really enjoyed the onboarding process,” Gabe says. “They have a selection of website templates I was able to customize. We applied our logo and color theme and worked together on the design. It was a great moment, the day we launched, when we changed the home page message from ‘Sign up here for more information’ to ‘Book Now.’”
Reservations have been flowing in ever since. Five Corners’ home page has a prominent button that visitors can navigate themselves, which connects directly to BentoBox’s back end.
“I have the app on my phone, so I get a notification when someone books a table,” Gabe reports. “It’s nice how you can see which guests we’ve gotten through Google My Business, from the website, etc. And I like being able to accept walk-ins: Just click the table, hit two or three, whatever — done.”
The ability to manage reservations ahead of time has come in even handier than he predicted.
“In the beginning I wasn’t using the automated confirmation texts. I didn’t think I needed to! Then we were getting a lot of no-shows or cancellations five minutes before. Now I send the confirmation about six hours before the table, and they’ll cancel or confirm right then so the slot opens back up.”
With Online Ordering and Pre-Order & Catering ready to go when the restaurant is, Gabe and the Five Corners team is close to realizing a dream — and opening the doors to a kind of restaurant the neighborhood hasn’t seen before.
Entrepreneur and hospitality veteran Gabriel Ribeiro was the founding manager during the the launch of Five Corners in early 2023.
“Five Corners is going to be the first Italian restaurant in the area. It’s a very modern, youthful restaurant and a brand new vibe for the neighborhood.”
The restaurant is located in the heart of Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, described by Eater as “a culinary gem.”
We needed a reservations platform, online ordering, catering, and a place to host the website — in one place. When I went to websites that I liked, I would scroll down to the bottom, and there it was: Powered by BentoBox.
Gabe Ribeiro
Founding Manager
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