_What I Built
🇮🇳 Ghar Ka Swaad — Every Taste Has a Story
What makes you feel at home?
For some of us, it is the smell of chai during the monsoon.
For some, it is a plate of rajma chawal waiting after a long day.
For others, it is idli and sambar, dal baati, poha, momos, litti chokha, biryani, or a recipe passed down through generations.
Ghar Ka Swaad is an interactive journey through India's regional comfort food, built around one simple idea:
Every state has a taste. Every taste has a story. Every story has a home.
Instead of creating a conventional restaurant landing page, I wanted to turn the landing page itself into an illustrated, interactive India.
The experience begins with:
“What makes you feel at home?”
The title GHAR KA SWAAD travels across multiple Indian scripts and languages, representing how one feeling can be expressed in many different languages.
From there, users are invited to explore an interactive map of India.
Each state has its own comfort-food identity, cultural atmosphere, regional characters, illustrations and stories.
Select Rajasthan and the interface transforms into a warm desert-inspired world with Rajasthani characters and Dal Baati Churma.
Select Tamil Nadu and the atmosphere changes again, bringing in Idli, Dosa and Sambar, South Indian cultural elements and a completely different visual personality.
The website currently explores all 28 Indian states, while also allowing common dishes to cross state boundaries because food doesn't always follow political borders.
🌧️ Monsoon Mode
Since comfort food becomes even more meaningful during India's rainy season, I also created a contextual monsoon experience.
When the rain arrives:
☕ Masala Chai + Bhajiya
🥟 Momos + Chutney
🌽 Hot Bhutta
🥔 Pakoras
🍜 Hot Noodles
become part of the experience.
☀️ Day & 🌙 Night
The entire environment also changes between day and night.
Day mode brings sunlight, clouds, warm colours and a lively atmosphere.
Night mode transforms the world with stars, moonlight, glowing windows, warm food stalls and subtle ambient animations.
The goal was to make the website feel like a living illustrated storybook rather than a static food website.
Demo
Live Demo:
https://gharkaswaad-5bk2v48.public.builtwithrocket.new
The experience is best explored interactively:
Start → Choose a state → Discover its food → Explore its story → Learn the recipe → Find it nearby → Explore another state
Journey
I started with a simple question:
What makes food feel like home?
The answer wasn't really about food.
It was about memory.
A dish can remind us of a person, a place, a festival, a rainy evening, a childhood kitchen or a family sitting around the same table.
That became the foundation of Ghar Ka Swaad.
Instead of building a conventional restaurant page, I designed the experience around:
Home → India → State → People → Food → Story → Recipe → Memory
One of the biggest challenges was making the experience feel visually rich without sacrificing usability. I wanted the illustrations, animations and cultural elements to enhance the experience rather than become distractions.
I also wanted the interface to respond to context.
That's why the same website can feel completely different depending on:
the selected state
day/night mode
monsoon mode
the food being explored
I used React, TypeScript, CSS and animation-driven interactions to build the experience with reusable components and structured state data.
The regional illustrations and food imagery are used to create a more immersive visual language, while the interactive map acts as the primary navigation mechanism.
What I learned
This project pushed me to think beyond:
“How do I make a beautiful webpage?”
and instead ask:
“How can the interface itself tell the story?”
The biggest lesson was that a landing page doesn't have to be just an introduction to a product.
It can become the product experience itself.
And perhaps the most important thing I discovered while building Ghar Ka Swaad:
Home doesn't always have an address. Sometimes, it has a recipe. ❤️
Built with: React · TypeScript · CSS · Framer Motion · SVG · Responsive Design
~Made by Sheezal Patel
Made for the DEV Frontend Challenge — Comfort Food Edition.
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