🚀 How I Built a Luxury Restaurant Reservation System with Next.js & Prisma

As developers, we learn best by building real projects. I wanted to challenge myself to create something that felt like a production-ready full-stack app — not just another todo list.

That’s how I built Elan Royale, a luxury restaurant reservation system where users can book a table, make a deposit, and receive instant confirmation.

This project not only helped me practice Next.js, Prisma, and full-stack development, but also gave me something powerful to showcase in my portfolio.

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🥂 The Problem I Wanted to Solve

Restaurants often rely on manual reservations (phone calls, paper logs) which can be messy and lead to errors. I wanted to create a modern solution that:
• Lets users easily reserve a table online.
• Collects a deposit using Stripe payments.
• Automatically confirms and stores the booking.

This was the idea behind Elan Royale.

⸻

🛠 Tech Stack

I picked technologies that are used in real production apps:
• Next.js 15 → for server-side rendering and API routes.
• Prisma ORM → to model and interact with the database.
• TailwindCSS → for fast, modern, responsive styling.
• Stripe → for payment gateway integration.
• Vercel → for smooth deployment and hosting.

⸻

⚙️ Building the System

Here’s how I built it step by step:

1. Setting up Next.js

I started by creating a Next.js app using the App Router. This gave me a strong foundation with server-side rendering and API routes.

1. Designing the UI

Using TailwindCSS, I designed a clean, modern interface.
• A Hero section to showcase the restaurant’s luxury feel.
• A Reservation Form with fields for name, email, phone, party size, date/time, and notes.

Reserve a Table

1. Database with Prisma

I defined the reservation schema in Prisma:

model Reservation {
id String @id @default(cuid())
name String
email String
phone String
partySize Int
reservationTime DateTime
area String
notes String?
createdAt DateTime @default(now())
}

This made it easy to create and query reservations in the database.

1. API Routes

I created an API route (/api/reservations) to handle saving reservations into the database.

export async function POST(req: Request) {
const body = await req.json();
const reservation = await prisma.reservation.create({ data: body });
return NextResponse.json(reservation, { status: 201 });
}

1. Stripe Payment Integration

Before confirming a reservation, the system redirects users to Stripe Checkout to pay a deposit.
• User fills the form → saved in DB.
• Stripe Checkout opens → user pays.
• On success, they are redirected to /confirmation.

const paymentRes = await fetch("/api/create-checkout-session", { ... });
const data = await paymentRes.json();
window.location.href = data.url;

1. Confirmation Page

After payment, users land on a Confirmation Page showing reservation details.

🎉 Reservation Confirmed!

Thank you for booking with Elan Royale.

⚡ Challenges I Faced & How I Solved Them
1. Prisma errors → Fixed by handling missing/invalid input properly in API.
2. Hero image loading slowly → Solved by switching to next/image for optimization.
3. useSearchParams error in Next.js 15 → Solved by wrapping in to support client-side params.

🎨 Final Result

✅ Users can make a reservation online.
✅ Payment deposit handled with Stripe.
✅ Confirmation page with booking details.
✅ Fully deployed to Vercel.

🔗 Live Demo: [elan-royale.vercel.app]
🔗 GitHub Repo: github.com/Aisha-Aliyu/elan-royale.git
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💡 Lessons Learned
• Next.js App Router makes full-stack projects much cleaner.
• Prisma is powerful for database modeling and migrations.
• Stripe integration is smooth but requires careful error handling.
• Deployment on Vercel is fast and beginner-friendly.

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✅ Conclusion

This project showed me how to bring together frontend, backend, database, and payments into one seamless full-stack app.

If you’d like to check it out, here’s the live demo and GitHub repo.

I’m also open to collaborations and freelance opportunities in full-stack web development — feel free to connect! 🚀