A restaurant theme that already knows what a restaurant needs
Pato is a free block theme for restaurants, bistros, cafés and bars. It ships the two things every restaurant site needs and normally has to buy a plugin for — a menu with prices and a booking form — plus six one-click starter sites, eight colour palettes and full site editing throughout.
A menu you edit like a page
A dish, a dotted leader and a price. It is built from ordinary blocks — two paragraphs in a group — so there is no custom post type, no menu builder and nothing to learn. Anyone who can edit a page can change a price, and the leader stretches to whatever width is left instead of wrapping like a row of typed dots.
Bookings without a plugin
The reservation form is part of the theme. It validates on the server, carries a nonce and a honeypot, and works with JavaScript turned off. Bookings go to the site’s admin address — or, with one filter, to whatever booking plugin, CRM or webhook you already use.
Six restaurants, one theme
A bar’s first screen asks for a table at eleven at night; a bakery’s says what came out of the oven. Pato ships six starter sites — bistro, fine dining, café, pizzeria, bar and bakery — and they differ all the way down: their own photographs, their own menu with its own dishes and prices, their own offers, their own gallery, their own palette and type pairing. The pizzeria lists a Margherita and a Diavola; the bar lists a Negroni. Importing one builds a front page you can edit like any other page, and it never touches a page you already have.
Dark mode the visitor controls
A restaurant site is read at night more than most — from a phone, on the way somewhere. The switch is the visitor’s, separate from the palette you chose, and it lifts your palette rather than replacing it: an olive site stays olive. It follows the system setting until someone decides for themselves, and it is applied before the first paint, so there is no flash of white.
What you get
It has a blog, too
Recipes, wine notes, what is happening in the kitchen. Archives, single posts, categories, tags, author pages, search and a 404 are all designed rather than inherited, with an optional sidebar layout for posts and pages.
Questions
No. Menus, reservations, opening hours, galleries and dark mode are all in the theme. WooCommerce is styled if you add it and is not required.
Appearance → Starter sites. Each one builds a front page and applies its palette and type pairing. It never edits or deletes a page you already have, so you can import more than one and keep whichever you prefer. Everything it creates is ordinary editable content.
To the site’s admin email address by default. If you already use a booking plugin, a CRM or a webhook, the pato_reservation_handlers filter hands the booking to it instead and Pato sends nothing of its own.
Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms, Forminator, Ninja Forms, Formidable and HappyForms are all mapped onto the theme’s own colours and spacing, so a form block does not look like a different website.
Eight palettes and five type pairings ship with the theme, and each is a one-click choice in the Site Editor under Styles. Beyond that, every colour in the theme is a palette entry you can edit there.
Yes. Every string is translatable and languages/pato.pot is included.
Yes, twice a day, because it is distributed outside the WordPress.org theme directory. It sends the theme, WordPress and PHP versions, the locale and a one-way hash of the site URL — no personal data and no site name. The pato_check_for_updates filter switches it off.
The details
| Requires | WordPress 6.6 or newer |
|---|---|
| PHP | 7.4 or newer |
| Tested up to | WordPress 7.1 |
| Licence | GNU General Public License v2 or later |
| Patterns | 64 |
| Templates | 14, plus 3 template parts |
| Starter sites | 6 |
| Styles | 8 colour palettes × 5 type pairings |
| Fonts | Montserrat, Poppins and Courgette, self-hosted |
| Build step | None — no npm, no SCSS |