Sukiyaki is a communal dish — a pot in the middle of the table that everyone cooks from at once — so the identity is built on the meal as a social event rather than a menu item. The research went into Edo-period printing and traditional palettes, and what it kept returning was not motif but discipline: balance, negative space, a refusal to fill the frame. That finding is useful precisely because it is unglamorous. The obvious move with a Japanese restaurant is decoration, and decoration is what makes hospitality sites look the same as each other.
So almost nothing is ornamental: monospaced type set small, one vertical Japanese lockup as the only flourish, and six named colours in a closed palette. Closing it is what stops a project drifting once there are twenty screens instead of five. A fixed baseline grid is why a thirty-item menu with prices and long ingredient lists resolves without anything being placed by hand — and the billboard is the check on whether any of it was real, because a type and colour system that only works at screen scale was never a system.
