Restaurant website 2026
The Red Car Madeira
Website for a 1950s American diner in Funchal, with a bilingual menu and a nine-layer signature burger assembled by scroll.
The project
The website for The Red Car, an American 50's Diner in Funchal. It combines a menu people can actually use, verified visit and order information, and an opening where the signature burger assembles as the visitor scrolls.
The burger has nine layers: bun, lettuce and mayo, and three storeys of cheddar and patty. Each layer lands slightly after the one before, and at the end the badge and the calls to action appear. The fullscreen navigation and the order panel are keyboard accessible.
Portuguese is the canonical language and English lives at /en. The venue photographs are still prototype assets, to be confirmed with the client before a public launch.
Up close.
Visual direction.
A modern drive-in for a real Funchal diner. It borrows the optimism, shapes and colour of 1950s American roadside culture, with contemporary scale, editorial spacing and restrained motion. Signal red, mustard, cream and midnight navy, with Archivo variable at different widths for headlines and text.
Typography
- Archivo
Colours
- #D72B20
- #F4B72F
- #FFF4DF
- #132654
- #111111
Under the hood.
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01
The order, position and drift direction of each burger layer live in a single configuration file. CSS renders the final assembled state and JavaScript only adds the motion.
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02
Scrolling is native, on a CSS sticky track with no scroll-jacking. Layers animate transforms only, and one combined shadow avoids nine expensive filters.
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03
Without JavaScript, or with prefers-reduced-motion, the story collapses to one viewport with the burger already assembled.
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04
The mobile menu and the order panel trap focus, lock background scrolling and close with Escape.
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05
The production image is an immutable PHP-FPM build with a separate Nginx image, precompiled Vite assets, OPcache and a persistent volume for SQLite.
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06
Business facts live in configuration and the menu in JSON, with tests for the homepage and for localisation.
Private project. Happy to walk through it on a call.