This is a submission for Frontend Challenge - Comfort Food Edition, Perfect Landing
Mirchi & Mirabelle is the landing page for a supper club that doesn't exist. It serves six courses, and every course is two places that have never met, put on one plate.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert JS developer. Just a guy with some thinking capacity and a lot of time to bother Claude to build something from that.
Demo:
🔗 Live: https://ravipurohit1991.github.io/MirchiMirabelle/
📦 Source: https://github.com/ravipurohit1991/MirchiMirabelle
Note: Code is completely written by Claude, the story and the dishes are mine :)
Motivation:
I was born in Jodhpur, grew up in Coimbatore and Tiruppur, spent ten years moving between Bordeaux, Metz, Poitiers, Toulouse and Grenoble, and now live in Copenhagen. Once a year I land in Kolkata, where my brother is.
For a long time I thought that made my food palette incoherent. It turns out it just makes the coincidences visible. Lets take beans for example: Rajasthan dries beans because nothing fresh survives the desert; Toulouse soaks beans overnight because that's how cassoulet works. Nobody copied anybody. Both places just looked at a dried bean and reached the same conclusion.
So the menu is built out of those collisions:
| Course | Dish | Parents |
|---|---|---|
| I | Cassoulet de Sangri | Ker sangri, Marwar × cassoulet, Toulouse |
| II | Degree Coffee Canelé | Kumbakonam decoction × canelé bordelais |
| III | Gratin Dauphinois, Kongu Tadka | Grenoble × Coimbatore |
| IV | Rugbrød Baati | Dal baati × Danish rye |
| V | Mirabelle Phuchka | Kolkata street water × Lorraine plums |
| VI | Mishti Skyr | Bengal clay pot × Nordic straining |
Underneath the menu is the part I actually enjoyed building: the pairing board. Five places, ten intersections, pick any two and the dish between them appears.
Halfway through writing those ten pairings I realised I wasn't inventing all of them.
- Rajasthan's mirchi vada and Tamil Nadu's milagai bajji are the same chilli in the same batter, 1,800 km apart, neither borrowed.
- Tamil pazhaya sadam and Bengali panta bhat are both last night's rice left in water overnight, and both regions will tell you it's the best breakfast in India.
- France calls its best pastry viennoiserie, "the Viennese things." Denmark calls its best pastry wienerbrød, "Vienna bread." The rest of the world calls it Danish. Nobody involved is claiming it.
- And France was in Bengal long before I got to France. Chandannagar flew the tricolour until 1950, an hour up the Hooghly from my brother's flat.
What I'd do next:
I want the pairing board to accept places it's never heard of. Right now it knows five, the five I have lived in; potentially allowing people to add their places.
There's a small thing at the bottom of the page that writes you a line and copies it to your clipboard, and it exists entirely so I can ask this:
What are your two places? The ones that got mixed together somewhere along the way, and what's the dish that lives between them? I'll take any pairing, including the ones you think don't work, those are usually the good ones.
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