Ember
A wood-fired restaurant site that feels like looking into the hearth.
The Challenge
Ember is a 40-cover restaurant in a Bermondsey railway arch where everything passes through a wood-fired hearth. Restaurant websites usually bury the atmosphere under booking widgets and PDF menus — this one needed to carry the feeling of the room: dark, warm, a little theatrical.
The Solution
We opened with fire. The hero is a deep amber-to-charcoal field with the restaurant's name set in Cormorant Garamond italic, drifting on scroll. Below it, three dishes float at three different parallax speeds around a single line of philosophy — the scroll moment that makes people stop.
The menu page is typography all the way down: dish names, clean rules, prices set in a light serif. No photography needed where the words are doing the cooking. A reservations page rounds it out with a simple form, hours, and a 48-hour cancellation policy stated plainly.
Key Features
The floating-dish section drives three images on independent scroll transforms (−20→+40px, +30→−50px, −10→+30px), creating genuine three-plane depth. All motion is GPU-friendly transforms only, and respects reduced-motion preferences throughout.
The palette — cream, charcoal-brown, ember orange — and the Cormorant/DM Sans pairing carry the brand from the hero to the allergen note. The reservation form is ready to wire into Resy or OpenTable when the restaurant is.
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