The challenge
Home cooks and private chefs have no simple storefront, and diners have no easy way to find one nearby. Chef'it set out to be that marketplace: browse kitchens by cuisine, see them on a map, book one.
The open question was which version of the idea people wanted, so the goal was to put working builds in front of people quickly rather than polish a single one.
The approach
I treated each build as an experiment and started from existing open-source projects, so the time went into the Chef'it parts: cuisine categories, kitchen listings, chef sign-up and branding. The commit history shows five builds between November 2022 and March 2023.
The furthest version stores each kitchen in Sanity with its address, rating, photos, coordinates and a cuisine category. Search runs a Sanity query that matches the text against each listing's title, address and description, and the map uses geolib to centre on the matching kitchens before Mapbox drops a marker on each one.
- Cuisine categoriesAsian, Mediterranean, Indian, American, European, Mexican, Latin and African tabs replace the stay types of the original template.
- Kitchen mapSearch results sit beside a Mapbox map centred on the matching kitchens.
- Listings in a CMSEach kitchen is a Sanity document with photos, address, contact info, rating and coordinates.
- Sign-in and waitlistGoogle sign-in through NextAuth, plus a landing page with a live sign-up counter read from MongoDB.
How a diner finds a kitchen
- 01BrowsePick a cuisine tab
- 02SearchSanity query by place or name
- 03MapCentre on results, one marker each
- 04Sign inGoogle via NextAuth
