03RestaurantConcept project
Sear
Appetite first, then the table.
- Year
- 2026
- Typical timeline
- 3 weeks
- Sector
- Restaurant
- Live site
- Visit the site (opens in a new tab)
- Work completed
- Art directionWeb designWeb developmentMotion
Sear does not exist. It is a burger restaurant built to answer the question most restaurant sites ignore — why book here, rather than walk in somewhere else? The answer is on the plate, so the site puts the plate first.
The brief
A brief we set ourselves: a premium burger restaurant — dry-aged beef, a Wagyu signature, fries cooked in beef dripping — whose site has to make a higher-priced meal feel worth planning for.
01Challenge
The problem worth solving
Restaurant sites tend to lead with the room, the story or the opening hours, and hide the food behind a PDF menu. For a place charging premium prices for something as familiar as a burger, that is backwards: the price only makes sense once you have seen what you are getting, and most sites show you too late.
Objectives
- 01Show the food before asking for anything
- 02Let three signature dishes do the work of a whole menu
- 03Keep a way to book beside every moment of appetite
- 04Stay fast, because hungry people are impatient people
02Strategy
The approach we took
We built the page like a short tasting menu. A dark, fire-lit opening sets the tone; then the signatures arrive on a light page, each reduced to the one number that explains its price — sixty days of dry-ageing, A5 Wagyu, one hundred per cent beef dripping. A Book a Table link sits directly beside them, so the moment of appetite and the way to act on it share a screen.
03Design
How it looks, and why
Two moods, on purpose. The opening is near-black, with a serif headline and a single coral phrase glowing like an ember; the signatures switch to warm off-white, so the food reads in its true colours. The numbers are set in a hand-drawn face, like a specials board, and the burger photograph is tilted just off the grid — plated rather than placed.
Display
9664402416
Palette
- Black#0A0A0A
- Off-white#F6F5F2
- Coral#E56B55
- Grey#555555
Grid — 12 col / 8px
04Development
How it was built
A single page with smooth scrolling and a pinned section that holds the story in place as you move through it. It is quick: the largest element paints in 0.7 seconds on a throttled connection, the whole page weighs around 680 KB, and nothing shifts as it loads.
Key features
- 01Food before everything: three signatures, each explained by a single number
- 02A Book a Table link beside the dishes, and in the header throughout
- 03A pinned story section that holds its place as you scroll
- 04Two deliberate moods — fire-lit dark, then daylight for the food
- 05Hand-drawn numerals, like a specials board
05Results
What was built
A restaurant that does not exist has no covers to count. What it has is the site: a page that shows the food before it asks for anything, a way to book never more than a glance from the dishes, and a load fast enough that nobody leaves hungry. Every figure below can be checked on the live site.
Concept project — Sear is fictional, but its website is live, and the figures below are measured from it rather than modelled. Performance was recorded over a throttled connection (4 Mbps, 70 ms latency) with a 4× CPU slowdown. Check them on the live site (opens in a new tab)
- 0.7s Largest contentful paint throttled
- 680KB Total page weight
- 3 Signature dishes, each sold by one number
- 0 Cumulative layout shift
Show people the burger, and the booking takes care of itself.
