Ember & Ash, wood-fire restaurant
Ember & Ash is a concept website we designed and built for a fictional wood-fire restaurant. It uses no photography at all: 3,600 embers animated on the GPU rise off a glowing coal bed and drift with your cursor, alongside a tabbed menu, a scroll-pinned timeline and a working table-booking flow. It runs at 60fps on integrated graphics.
The brief
Independent restaurants mostly run on interchangeable templates: a stock photo, a PDF menu and a booking widget. The brief was to make the fire itself the brand, with no photography at all.
What we built
A GPU ember field that rises off a glowing coal bed and drifts with your cursor, a tabbed menu, a scroll-pinned 'day at the hearth' timeline and a table-booking flow, with every visual drawn in code.
Build facts
Verifiable facts about this build, not client results.
- 3,600
- Embers animated on the GPU
- 60 fps
- On a laptop's integrated GPU
- 0
- Image files used
Stack
- Next.js
- React Three Fiber
- GLSL shaders
- GSAP ScrollTrigger
- Tailwind CSS
How it was made.
Why no photography
Stock food photography is the single most interchangeable thing about restaurant websites, and commissioning a shoot is out of reach for most independents before they open. Building the atmosphere in code instead means the brand can be art-directed with a colour and a physics constant rather than a photographer's calendar.
3,600 embers, one draw call
The ember field is a single instanced buffer geometry driven by a GLSL vertex shader. Position, drift and flicker are computed per-particle on the GPU from a time uniform and a seeded offset, so the CPU does nothing each frame. That is what keeps it at 60fps on an integrated GPU rather than a workstation card.
Motion that knows when to stop
The whole ember system is gated behind prefers-reduced-motion and pauses when the canvas leaves the viewport. The menu, the timeline and the booking flow are plain server-rendered HTML underneath, so the site works completely with the canvas disabled.
More concept builds
- Torque & Co., independent garageA garage website built around trust: an exploded brake assembly you scroll apart, up-front pricing and a plain-English symptom checker.
- Morrow Coffee, specialty caféA café website with a 3D cup, a drink builder that re-pours your order as you choose it, and a tap-to-stamp loyalty card.
Want one of these for a real brand?
Tell us what you need and get a written scope, timeline and fixed quote within 48 hours of a free 30-minute call, whether or not you hire us.
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