Fresh out of the steamer

Steamy Windows is a dumpling bar & shop on the Hoogpoort in Ghent. You eat dumplings, you drink sake or something without alcohol, and you can take a bag of frozen ones home with you. We won’t explain the name: open a bamboo steamer and look at the window.

Their site ran on Squarespace. We rebuilt it in Kirby and put it live on 1 October. In between other things, in two days. Not every project is a months-long programme — sometimes the question is simply: this thing has to keep working, and it has to be ours.

The design stayed as it was. That was the brief: nobody was waiting for a new look, they were waiting for a site they actually own. We put the old and the new side by side at 1440 and at 375 pixels until nothing shifted any more.

What did change sits under the bonnet. Every photo, every opening hour and every line of text now lives in their own admin. And the slideshow on the homepage loads its images up front, so it doesn’t stutter while you get hungry.

That’s ours now too. The tables, the time slots and the confirmation emails have been running on our own booking system since the start of October. There’s a whole story behind that — how you move a restaurant to a different system without a single guest noticing — and we’ll tell it another time.

Hungry in the meantime? steamywindows.be. Stay tuned for the rest.