140° by Mallory Gabsi

A chef’s name, a TV story and a restaurant opening on a fixed date. 140° is the Belgian fritkot of chef Mallory Gabsi, with a restaurant in Paris, in the Montorgueil district, another in Brussels near Gare Maritime, and a foodtruck for events. The name tells its own origin story: during a TV cooking competition, chef Christophe Hardiquest told Mallory that frying oil must be at 140°, not 130°, for the perfect fry. A few weeks later, in the Guerre des Restos challenge, the idea of a street food concept inspired by Belgian fritkots was born. In June 2026 the brand needed its website, and it needed it now.

The Challenge

The design already existed. The website had been designed by Black Cod, the Antwerp creative office, in Adobe XD, on top of the brand guidelines approved at the start of the project. The client’s team and the agency had already been through the review rounds. What was missing was the website itself, and there was no time for a long project: the brand is known and its name is searched on Google every day.

We received the source files on Friday 19 June 2026, in the evening.

What had to be delivered:

• A website faithful to the Black Cod design, down to its angled yellow sections and its vintage fritkot photography
• Pages for the menu, the two addresses, the foodtruck and contact, then English and an FAQ
• A store locator that sends visitors to the right restaurant with one tap
• Local SEO strong enough to own the brand searches around Mallory Gabsi and 140°
• Performance that holds up with a full screen video on the homepage
• GDPR compliance for two companies, one in France and one in Belgium

From Adobe XD to Live in Four Days

The first commit went in the same night the files arrived. By Saturday the homepage matched the XD design, by Sunday the inner pages were built, and on Monday 22 June the domain moved to Cloudflare behind a password protected preview, so the client could review the real site at the real address. On Tuesday 23 June the preview gate came off and 140degres.com went live, with a pre launch pass on SEO, performance, accessibility and analytics done the same day.

We did not rebuild the design to fit a theme. We coded Black Cod’s layouts as Astro components: the angled yellow sections, the framed photos, the black and white images of old Brussels fritkots, the serif display type and the italic tagline “High heat. High standards.” The homepage opens on a video of fries going into the oil, followed by Mallory Gabsi’s own words on how 140° started, signed in his hand.

What We Built

A menu people actually read. The carte is built in HTML from the restaurant’s PDF menu, with fries, the Moscovite special fry, smash burgers and combos, and the PDF remains downloadable. When the August carte came in, prices and dishes were updated on the site and in the PDF the same day.

Two addresses, one store locator. The Paris and Brussels restaurants each get a card with the illustrated storefronts from the brand, their address and their own opening hours. An interactive map places both, and a directions button opens Google Maps on the right restaurant.

A foodtruck page that sells events. The 140° foodtruck travels to festivals, sports events, launches and company parties in France and Belgium. The page shows it in action and leads straight to the events team and its brochure.

English from day two. The full site was duplicated in English on 24 June with a language switch, for the tourists who find the Paris restaurant on Google.

Local SEO and AI search. Both restaurants are described with Restaurant structured data: address, coordinates and opening hours, including dated summer hours for Paris. A dedicated FAQ page answers what people really ask (where it is, opening hours, why “140 degrés”, whether the fries are cooked in beef fat, whether the meat is halal) and carries FAQPage structured data, so Google and AI assistants can quote it directly.

GDPR done properly. A cookie consent banner gates analytics, and the legal pages carry the company and VAT details of both the French and the Belgian entity.

Measured from the first day. Google Analytics 4, Microsoft Clarity and Search Console were installed at launch. We also produced the QR codes the agency needed for print (Instagram, the Paris menu and Google reviews for Paris).

How We Worked

Fast does not mean alone. The client sent his corrections on the live preview, we answered with commits rather than meetings, and the agency stayed in the loop for everything that touched print and brand. After launch, the content team sent the FAQ and the corrected opening hours, and they went live within days. We also run the brand’s Google Workspace, so email, the team’s accounts and the website are handled by the same partner.

The Results

Live on 140degres.com on 23 June 2026, four days after the design files arrived. English, cookie consent and legal pages followed within two weeks, and the FAQ and structured data by mid July.

Close to 20,000 Google clicks since launch. Search Console counts about 19,700 clicks from 88,000 impressions between 29 June and 14 October 2026, at an average position of 2.5 and a click through rate of 22%. 89% of those clicks come from France.

The brand searches are owned. “140 degrés paris” is the site’s biggest query and ranks at position 1.0. Searches for the chef, like “mallory gabsi friterie” and “friterie mallory gabsi”, rank at 1.9, and “belgian fritkot paris” brings visitors who did not even know the name yet.

97/100 on mobile performance and 100/100 on accessibility, best practices and SEO, measured with Lighthouse in October 2026, with a full screen video on the homepage. The static Astro build served by Cloudflare has no database and no plugin to maintain.

What This Project Is Really About

When a well known chef opens a restaurant, people search for it the same day. The value of this project is not that it was quick. It is that the agency’s design reached the public intact, in four days, and that the website has been answering those searches at the top of Google ever since.