El Encanto

A wine garden in Quito. Built around small-grower bottles, food made for the table, and an outdoor garden that doubles as the dining room.

A full engagement: name, brand, strategy, the website at elencanto-uio.com, on-site pieces (menus, signage, the little stuff that touches a guest), social media and photography for the place, and the operations app the team uses to run service.

A warm dark room. A hand-drawn mark in cream like ink on a coaster. Wine first, then the food that goes with it, then the garden that holds both. Everything tuned to feel like a table you sit down at, not a brand you scan.

A mark and a wordmark that name what the place is.

Wine country at dusk. Deep browns and grass green hold the room. Gold and beige are the candlelight. Accent red is for the bottle you want to remember.

Arboria in two weights for the words, Lindsey for the handwritten touches: chalkboard specials, a flourish on a card.

Photography from the place: the house, the corridor, the garden.

The team at El Encanto needed something to run service. I built it with them, and it kept growing.

It started as orders in, tickets out. Now the whole operation lives in it: the floor and the kitchen, cash and close-out, inventory and recipe costs, reservations and walk-ins, staff hours and scheduling, a shared supplier directory, purchases and expenses, and the accounting behind all of it. Every sale files itself with the SRI through electronic invoicing hosted inside the app, and the monthly IVA return and the ATS annex now come straight out of the books instead of being assembled by hand.

The public website came into the same codebase too: the landing, the QR menu, and online reservations ship from the repo and deploy on their own, replacing the original Framer site.

Building from scratch means we can shape it to the room instead of fitting the room to someone else's POS.

• Web client: React + Tailwind, mobile first, runs on whatever device is closest to the host
• API: Hono on Node with WebSockets for live order state
• Printing: 80mm comandas, pre-cuentas, and SRI receipts straight from the browser to the thermal printer
• Data: Postgres with Drizzle, fully typed, with the tax math covered by tests

The whole flow, start to finish: a waiter takes the order, the kitchen sees it, the table sees a bill, the night closes out.

Brand and site are live. The operations app runs the room every service and keeps growing, deep in the accounting side as of August 2026. The white-label version of it is Mantel.