Piccolo Buco by Cooper's Hawk

Piccolo Buco is one of the newest concepts of Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants, a fast-growing hospitality organization centered around food, wine and cultivating memorable experiences. After Cooper’s Hawk founder Tim McEnery went on a well-researched trip to Italy, he discovered Chef Luca Issa’s Neapolitan pizza near the Trevi Fountain in Rome. He was able to bring the world famous pizza back to the U.S., opening Piccolo Buco by Luca Issa and Cooper’s Hawk in Oak Brook, Illinois.

The Challenge

Cooper’s Hawk has partnered with Clearfire since early 2021 to provide design, development, and consulting services for its primary website. This includes new feature development, ongoing maintenance, and assistance in managing crucial integrations for its popular wine club membership and reservation bookings.

After working with Clearfire to develop another new brand, Esquire by Cooper’s Hawk, the brand partnered with Clearfire again for Piccolo Buco’s new website. Clearfire worked alongside Cooper’s Hawk’s design agency, Rise Interactive, for both website projects.

Piccolo Buco was set to open in June 2022, and the new website needed to launch in coordination with the grand opening. This gave Clearfire a tight development timeline to go live with the new website. In addition, we were also finishing up a six-week sprint to launch Esquire’s website during this time.

The Solution

To coordinate the new branding, Clearfire collaborated with the design agency to integrate rich imagery, compelling videos and playful typography into the site. We used background elements and subtle details to bring the designs to life with animations and visuals, incorporating intentional details to create an interactive website experience.

Because the majority of web traffic to Cooper’s Hawk is mobile, we specifically customized both Piccolo Buco’s and Esquire’s sites with vertical images and videos that are specific to mobile devices.

Just as with Esquire, Piccolo Buco’s website is built using Craft CMS, a flexible managing system for content creators. Because Craft CMS doesn’t make any assumptions about design, this allows our clients to set up content management exactly how they want. The ability to build the CMS specific to the site as it’s being developed is one of Craft’s benefits – and one of Clearfire’s distinct capabilities and areas of expertise.

We understand that the content editing experience is important for our clients, so when we build with Craft CMS, we intentionally customize it to make it easier for their team after the site is launched – from leaving directions in the control panel to specifying image dimensions that they’ll need going forward.

In this way, Clearfire enhances the user experience for the content editor. Now Cooper’s Hawk’s team is able to have control over the Piccolo Buco site with an intuitive content management system.

The timeline for this project ran eight weeks. Clearfire received the design files in March 2022, and – while also launching Esquire by Cooper’s Hawk that same month – developed the site to go live with the grand opening of Piccolo Buco in mid-June 2022.

The Results

Both Esquire’s and Piccolo Buco’s sites launched on time and without any issues, coordinating with their celebratory grand openings.

One significant feature of Piccolo Buco’s new website is the online menu. The design and implementation of the menu was an intentional process, meant to stand out against the majority of online restaurant menus that are hard-to-read PDFs.

Now, using Craft CMS, the Cooper’s Hawk team can continue to create custom menu pages or modifications with the same appealing design as desired. Craft CMS displays defined fields to fill in for each menu item and allows a positive user experience with easy reading on both desktop and mobile.

Piccolo Buco’s website was also coded with performance best practices in mind, which is reflected by a Google Page Speed score of 99 on desktop devices. This is an incredible achievement and will certainly have a positive effect on brand awareness and user experience.

Overall, Piccolo Buco’s engaging, visually appealing website matches the brand’s new style of pizza – “created in the Italian tradition of simplicity, quality and craftsmanship.”