Room 13 · Open-fire restaurant · Concept
Cenusa
Cooked on what the fire leaves.
Cenusa, a fictional open-fire restaurant. The menu is read as heat, from embers to open flame, and filters light the dishes that match.
Concept project — fictional brand. This project was created by ARTLOGIC to demonstrate a possible brand and digital experience. The organization, name, people, prices, and data shown are fictional. This is not client work and does not represent measured business results.
01 The brief
- The brand
- Cenusa is a fictional restaurant that cooks on live fire. Its line is "Cooked on what the fire leaves."
- The problem
- A visitor wants to know what an evening is like and which dishes suit them. The site shows the menu, story, events and a reservation request in a dark, warm setting.
02 The idea
A menu you read as heat
- What you see
- Every dish carries a heat level from 1 (Embers) to 4, shown as four rising bars. Choosing heat levels or dietary labels lights the matching rows and lets the others fall back to ash. A fire glow behind the page changes with the level chosen.
- How it works
- The menu is a fixed ledger of heat, dish and price, so rows change state and never position. The filter is a client component reading the same dish data as the rest of the site, and a link can open the menu at a given heat.
03 Design system
- Dark Ground#1A1714 groundSoot-brown page background.
- Bone Ink#D8D0C4 inkAll body and heading text.
- Ember#E2552D accentPrimary buttons and the second heat step.
- Ash Muted#9C9488 mutedSecondary text and unlit menu rows.
- Heat Gold #F7B84B. The top of a four-step heat ramp that starts at #B8431F.
- Soot #221E1A. Form-field surface.
- Type
- Gloock
The hero wordmark, headings and dish names. - Albert Sans
Body text, labels and buttons.
- Gloock
- Edges
- Corners are nearly square at 2px. No cards, pills or drop shadows. Depth comes from light: a film grain, a row wash and a glow rising from below.
- Motion
- The glow flickers slowly and hero images crossfade as the heat changes. The flicker, transitions and video stop under reduced motion.
04 Process
Pre-production
Pre-production followed the project brief and the concept notes: a dark room lit by fire, a menu organised by heat, and no fictional claims presented as fact.
Build
The build covered seven pages: home, menu, story, events, gallery, location and reservations. Logo, fonts and colours come from the shared brand registry.
Finish review
Impeccable finish-review rounds compared the built pages with the direction and returned an ordered list of fixes. One result was a re-grade of six photographs so the set looked consistent.
Fixes
The fixes were applied and checked again, and the design system was documented from the finished build.
05 Technology and accessibility
- Stack
- Next.js 16, Tailwind CSS 4 and TypeScript, inside the studio's single application.
- Particular to this site
- Client-side heat and diet filter
- Ambient embers video with a still poster
- Optimised WebP images
- Access
- Filters are labelled fieldsets of real checkboxes
- Result count is announced in a polite live region
- Dietary labels are written as text, never colour alone
- The ambient video can be paused and does not autoplay under reduced motion
- Skip link and a visible 2px focus ring
- Prefers-reduced-motion stops flicker, transitions and video
- Tests
- Covered by its own Playwright end-to-end spec.
06 Honest notes
Cenusa is a fictional brand and this site is a concept by Artlogic. The address, hours, events and prices are invented.
The reservation form is a demo. It stores nothing and says so on the page.
The photographs and the embers video are free stock from Unsplash and Pexels, used as stand-ins for a restaurant that does not exist. Some were darkened and colour-graded so they sit together. Generated images are planned to replace them.
07 See it
Fictional prototype. A concept by ARTLOGIC for a fictional brand. English only.