ChefNear
ChefNear is a fully Arabic, RTL home-food marketplace connecting local home chefs with customers looking for authentic home-cooked meals and catering, built during a SpaceTech training team project. I contributed to the frontend build rather than leading it, working alongside the team on the customer-facing React interface.
A stronger hero that frames this project like a real case study instead of a plain information page.
Impact
Overview
ChefNear is a home-food marketplace built entirely in Arabic with a right-to-left interface: customers discover local home chefs, browse dishes by category (main dishes, Middle Eastern food, desserts, salads, drinks, pasta, appetizers), and order catering for events, while chefs can join the platform and manage their offerings.
This was a SpaceTech training team project where I worked as a frontend contributor rather than the lead — helping build out the React interface alongside the rest of the team, focused mainly on the customer-facing marketplace experience.
Problem
Home-cooked food and small local chefs are often discovered informally, through word of mouth or social media, with no structured way to browse dishes, compare chefs, or order for a one-off event like a family gathering.
The frontend needed to present a marketplace that felt trustworthy and easy to browse in Arabic, while also giving chefs a clear path to join and be discovered.
Key Features
- Customer marketplace: browse chefs and dishes by category, see ratings and pricing, and order dishes or request catering for events
- Chef-facing entry points: "Join as a chef" (add your kitchen) flow and a chef dashboard area for managing listings
- Fully Arabic, right-to-left interface, including navigation, dish cards, and footer site-map
- Newsletter signup and a clear help/support structure (FAQ, help center, terms, safety and quality standards)
Timeline
Started from a React + TypeScript + Vite frontend and built out the marketplace UI.
Built browsing, categories, dish cards, and ordering-facing UI for discovering local chefs and dishes.
Worked on the chef-facing entry points: joining as a chef, and the structure for a chef dashboard.
Refined the Arabic RTL layout, navigation, and footer/site-map structure across the app.
User Workflow
- Customers land on the ChefNear homepage, browse dishes and chefs by category, and can order individual dishes or request catering for larger events.
- Chefs join through a dedicated onboarding entry point and get access to a dashboard area for their listings.
- The whole experience — navigation, content, and forms — is built right-to-left for a native Arabic-reading audience rather than as a translated afterthought.
Architecture
- The frontend is a React + TypeScript single-page app built with Vite, styled with Tailwind CSS.
- Routing and layout are structured around two audiences: the customer-facing marketplace (discovery, categories, catering) and the chef-facing area (onboarding, dashboard).
Technical Focus
- Contributed to the customer-facing marketplace UI: category browsing, dish cards, and the homepage layout.
- Worked on RTL-aware layout details so Arabic text, icons, and navigation read correctly right-to-left throughout the app.
- Helped structure the chef-facing entry points (join as a chef, dashboard area) alongside the rest of the frontend team.
Challenges Solved
- Keeping a content-dense marketplace homepage (categories, featured dishes, chefs, catering, newsletter) organized and easy to scan in Arabic RTL.
- Coordinating frontend work as part of a team rather than owning the whole build, which meant keeping my changes consistent with patterns other teammates had already set.
Deployment
- The frontend is deployed on Vercel as a live, publicly accessible demo.
Outcome
ChefNear shows I can step into an existing team's frontend and contribute effectively — working within established patterns on a fully Arabic, RTL product — rather than only building projects from scratch on my own.