🍽️ Restaurant · Footscray, Melbourne
Authentic Ethiopian cuisine served with love since 2011
Research Phase
Before writing a single line of code, our research agent studied Ras Dashen — their current website, social presence, reviews, team, and services. Here's what stood out.
Founded by Ethiopian refugee Wondimu Alemu and his wife Alemitu Aberra in 2011 — named after Ethiopia's highest peak, Ras Dashen (4,550m)
Signature dishes: Doro Wot ($24, Ethiopia's national dish), Vegetarian Combo ($22, six plant-based dishes on injera), Special Clay Tibs ($26), and a traditional Coffee Ceremony ($12) with three rounds — Abol, Tona, and Baraka
4.8 stars with 629+ Google reviews, Time Out five-star review calling it 'one of Melbourne's greatest African restaurants' — hours Tue–Thu 5:30–10pm, Fri–Sat 12–10:30pm, Sun 12–10pm
Design Phase
Every design decision was intentional — informed by the research, not pulled from a template library.
Visual Direction
Coffee brown and berbere red palette with Ethiopian flag accent stripe, Playfair Display and Dancing Script fonts, woven background textures, diamond dividers, and noise overlay.
Design Rationale
Ethiopian cuisine is deeply ceremonial. The design honours that with warm coffee tones, woven textures echoing traditional textiles, and the flag's green-yellow-red as accent borders.
Build Phase
Site Architecture
// Next.js App Router
Methodology
Spark (research agent) scraped Ras Dashen's current website, Google reviews, social media, and business listings. Every piece of real data — team names, service pricing, business hours, unique details — was extracted into a structured profile.
Based on the research, a bespoke design direction was created specifically for Ras Dashen. No templates — the typography, color palette, layout patterns, and visual effects were all chosen to match this business's personality and industry.
Pixel (design agent) built the entire 4-page Next.js application from scratch — 5 custom components, real content from the research phase, App Router with proper routing, and production-grade code.
Sentinel (QA agent) verified the build compiles cleanly, checked for placeholder content, validated all routes render correctly, and confirmed the design is unique (not recycled from another demo).
Additional Notes
Research sourced from public sources. All business data extracted and verified.
More from the experiment
This case study is part of the AI Web Lab — a 30-day experiment where AI agents build bespoke websites for real Melbourne businesses. Every site is researched, designed, and built from scratch by a team of five specialist AI agents. The full methodology, code, and results are documented transparently.
This study is being prepared for publication as part of a research paper on AI-assisted web development at scale.
We built Ras Dashen's site in 4 minutes. Same process, same quality — a custom website built for you, not a template.