Risū & Oak

Overview

Risū & Oak is a restaurant website template I built to explore how far I could push performance, accessibility, and design polish in a single template. Most restaurant sites are slow, image-heavy, and hard to navigate on mobile, even though most diners look them up on their phones. I wanted a template that flipped that and treated mobile as the primary experience.

What's included

The template covers the pages a restaurant actually needs - hero, menu, location, reservations, and contact. Astro handles the static generation so first paint is fast even on slow connections. React powers the interactive parts where they're needed - reservation forms, menu filters - and stays out of the way everywhere else. Tailwind keeps the design system tight without bloating the bundle.

Performance and accessibility

Lighthouse scores were a hard requirement. The template runs at near-perfect performance, accessibility, and SEO scores out of the box, with proper image optimization, semantic HTML, and keyboard navigation. The accessibility work was the most useful part of the project for me - it forced me to write better markup habits I've carried into other builds.

What I learned

Building a template, instead of a one-off site, taught me how much detail matters for the people who'll customize it. Every assumption I baked into the design - typography choices, color tokens, image aspect ratios - became something a future user would have to either accept or fight. The cleanest templates are the ones that leave the right doors open without leaving the user staring at too many blank pages.