🏢 Cafe / Restaurant · Kew, Melbourne
Kew · Local Business
Research Phase
Before writing a single line of code, our research agent studied Cru — their current website, social presence, reviews, team, and services. Here's what stood out.
A dual-personality venue — family-friendly brunch cafe by day (28 seats, house-roasted coffee) that transforms into an intimate Euro-leaning wine bar by night with a moody eight-seat wine cellar for private degustations
Their signature breakfast 'The Stop 80' is named after the tram stop directly outside on Glenferrie Road — featuring crispy bacon, fried eggs, tasty cheese, spinach and tomato relish in a buttery brioche bun, per Broadsheet and Urban List
Research uncovered a potential rebrand: crukew.com.au now redirects to townandcountryau.com ('Town and Country'), which references a 'Crudo Warehouse' function space — suggesting the business may have evolved or changed hands since the Broadsheet/Urban List coverage
Design Phase
Every design decision was intentional — informed by the research, not pulled from a template library.
Visual Direction
A 6-page site with 9 components including a bespoke WinePairingSelector interactive element, Accordion for menu categories, ImageGallery, and TestimonialCarousel. The route structure separates the day (menu) and night (wine, private dining) experiences across dedicated pages, with Framer Motion transitions reflecting the venue's mood shift from bright cafe to intimate wine bar.
Design Rationale
Cru's dual identity — casual brunch spot and serious wine bar — demands a design that serves two distinct audiences without alienating either. The WinePairingSelector component speaks to the wine-savvy evening crowd browsing 300-400+ bottles, while the menu page with Corsican-Mediterranean brunch items serves the daytime family audience. The private dining page showcases the eight-seat wine cellar as a bookable experience, converting a unique physical space into an online conversion point.
Build Phase
Site Architecture
// Next.js App Router
Methodology
Spark (research agent) scraped Cru's current website, Google reviews, social media, and business listings. Every piece of real data — team names, service pricing, business hours, unique details — was extracted into a structured profile.
Based on the research, a bespoke design direction was created specifically for Cru. No templates — the typography, color palette, layout patterns, and visual effects were all chosen to match this business's personality and industry.
Pixel (design agent) built the entire 6-page Next.js application from scratch — 9 custom components, real content from the research phase, App Router with proper routing, and production-grade code.
Sentinel (QA agent) verified the build compiles cleanly, checked for placeholder content, validated all routes render correctly, and confirmed the design is unique (not recycled from another demo).
Additional Notes
Research covered 8 sources including Broadsheet Melbourne, Urban List Melbourne, and Yelp, achieving medium data completeness. A significant discovery was that crukew.com.au now redirects to a different brand (Town and Country / Crudo Warehouse), raising questions about the business's current status. Yelp still lists Cru as active with current hours. No direct phone or email could be independently verified. Brave Search API was exhausted, limiting deeper investigation.
For Reference
Cru's current website: www.crukew.com.au
More from the experiment
This case study is part of the AI Web Lab — a 30-day experiment where AI agents build bespoke websites for real Melbourne businesses. Every site is researched, designed, and built from scratch by a team of five specialist AI agents. The full methodology, code, and results are documented transparently.
This study is being prepared for publication as part of a research paper on AI-assisted web development at scale.
We built Cru's site in 10 minutes. Same process, same quality — a custom website built for you, not a template.