Project Overview
A restaurant that also operates one of Los Angeles’s most sought-after private event venues cannot serve both audiences with a single page or a standard hospitality website template. Redbird, Chef Neal Fraser’s flagship Modern American restaurant, operates inside the former rectory building of Vibiana, the cathedral-turned-event-venue in Downtown Los Angeles that Fraser and his wife Amy Knoll Fraser also own and operate. The property houses a 140-seat Main Dining Room with a retractable roof and views of the historic bell tower, six private dining rooms accommodating groups from intimate dinners to 800-person galas, and the Vibiana Main Hall used for weddings, fundraisers, fashion shows, and cultural events throughout the year.
High-volume restaurant and event venues face a website challenge that neither pure restaurant sites nor pure event venues typically solve well: the platform must simultaneously serve the guest who wants to book a table for dinner tonight, the couple planning their wedding reception 18 months from now, the corporate event planner sourcing a venue for a client appreciation dinner, and the catering buyer who needs offsite service for a Beverly Hills brand activation. Each of these audiences arrives with different search intent, different decision timelines, and different information needs, and a website that optimizes for only one of them leaves the others without a clear path forward.
Redbird earned a place in the Michelin Guide California, a spot on Wine Enthusiast’s Top 100 Wine Restaurants in the United States, and Wine Spectator’s Best of Award of Excellence for its wine program under Director Jaime Arzate. Bar Director Tobin Shea is a James Beard Award finalist whose cocktail program has received Time Out recognition. Chef Fraser himself has appeared in Food and Wine, Vogue, Architectural Digest, and Eater Los Angeles, and the restaurant has been featured on Jonathan Gold’s LA Times 101 Best Restaurants list. The digital platform needed to communicate this caliber of recognition to guests who may discover Redbird through a Google search before they have any context for the restaurant’s standing in Los Angeles’s competitive dining landscape.
The Vibiana property also has significant historical and cultural value, having served as the first permitted building in the City of Los Angeles and received the LA Conservancy’s Chair’s Award in 2019, its highest recognition for adaptive reuse and historic preservation. Chef Fraser’s commitment to community runs throughout the operation: during the early COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, he hired back laid-off staff to cook over 1,300 meals daily for unhoused Angelenos for three months in partnership with Wells Fargo and LAHSA. The restaurant’s annual Beefsteak event raises funds for the LA Regional Food Bank. These community dimensions of the Redbird story were part of the brand identity that the website needed to carry authentically alongside the accolades and the venue capabilities.
Our Solution
Restaurants and event venues operating at the scale and prestige of Redbird need a digital platform that handles four fundamentally different conversion journeys within a single visual identity: the dinner reservation, the private dining inquiry, the full venue event booking, and the offsite catering request. Keyideas built Redbird’s website with a clear primary navigation structure that surfaced each of these pathways from the homepage without forcing any of the four audience types to search through content intended for the others. The restaurant and the venue received distinct sections with distinct conversion flows while sharing the visual language of the Vibiana property’s historic architecture.
We integrated OpenTable reservation management for regular dining service, including the Lounge and Main Dining Room, with separate booking paths for each space that accounted for different minimum party sizes, different menu formats, and different service styles. The private dining and events section was built as an inquiry-driven workflow that captured event type, date, guest count, and specific room preferences, routing to the events team with enough pre-qualification information to allow same-day follow-up. For select dates and room combinations, we implemented an instant book feature for private dining, allowing qualified event planners to confirm a space directly online without waiting for availability confirmation from the events team.
The content architecture surfaced Redbird’s editorial press coverage, award recognition, and chef credentials in a social proof framework that appeared throughout the site at decision-relevant moments rather than isolated to a single press page. Chef Neal Fraser’s biography, Bar Director Tobin Shea’s James Beard recognition, Wine Director Jaime Arzate’s acclaimed wine list, and the restaurant’s Michelin Guide listing were integrated into the dining experience section in a way that communicated the depth of the team without reading as a credential inventory. The seasonal menu system allowed the kitchen team to update dishes and highlight local sourcing without requiring developer involvement, keeping the food presentation current with the culinary team’s actual priorities.
Competitor upscale restaurants in Downtown Los Angeles including Bavel, Bestia, and Felix operate excellent dining-focused websites. Keyideas differentiated Redbird’s platform by building the full event and venue capability into the same seamless experience, positioning Redbird and Vibiana as a unified destination that generates revenue across restaurant service, private dining, full venue events, and offsite catering simultaneously. The platform also supports the 100-plus Vibiana events per year and the 400-plus private dining room events annually, providing the events team with a digital infrastructure capable of handling inquiry volume from wedding planners, corporate buyers, and cultural institutions who use the venue for events ranging from intimate fundraisers to full cathedral galas for hundreds of guests.
