Hwaro

Hwaro is a restaurant website design concept. The brief: what would a custom-coded site look like for a small Korean barbecue counter that takes itself seriously? Most independent restaurant sites in this category run on Squarespace templates that prioritize a food-photography hero, then collapse into a confusing menu PDF and a Google Maps embed.

The design lead-out:

• A full-bleed live-fire hero with bilingual brand (화로 / HWARO) and an unapologetic display H1.
• A reading band for the introduction. Quiet, paper-white, lets the food story breathe before the menu lands.
• A dark menu grid with feature dishes weighted larger and mixed sizes for visual rhythm. Not a price-list table.
• An experience section (“The fire is yours”) explaining the counter format, formatted like a short essay.
• Room photography in an asymmetric grid that mirrors the brick-and-counter physicality of the room itself.
• A visit section with hours, address, reservation logic, and a phone fallback. The boring stuff, but legible.

This is the kind of restaurant website I would ship for a real client in this size range. Faster than Squarespace, easier to live with than Wix, and the room feels like the room. The same approach scales to any small independent restaurant. Café, wine bar, bakery. Different food, same problem with template sites, same custom-coded solution.