Contact, and why this redesign

Contact

Where

Canberra Centre, 148 Bunda St
Ground Level, between Bunda Street and Scotts Crossing
Canberra City ACT 2601

Email is the only way to reach Inari in writing. Inari publishes no phone number, so this site prints none — not even an example.

When

Dinner only. No lunch service, any day.

Mon–Thu: 5–9pm
Fri: 5–9.30pm
Sat: 5–9.30pm
Sun: 5–9pm

Lunch is pre-booked groups of ten or more only; there is no walk-in lunch service.

Elsewhere

The first link is Inari's real website. Everything you are reading is not.

Why I like them

A chef working alone at the pass under a paper lantern, plating on a white board. — Photography by Inari, used with permission and not monetised. One of four kitchen photographs in this project; none of them are styled press shots.

I work at Inari part-time. That is the reason this redesign exists, and also the reason I am careful about what it claims: most of what I know about the place I learned standing in it, which is exactly the kind of knowledge that does not belong on a public page unless someone else can check it.

What I would want a stranger to understand is how much of the food is decided by hand, every service. The kitchen photographs in this project are not marketing set-ups. One is a pair of hands laying a bamboo leaf across a tray of oysters on ice. Another is one chef plating alone at the pass. That is what the work looks like from the inside, and it is why the photography carries the site instead of decorating it.

The other thing worth understanding is how much the kitchen already knows. Every dish has a written description, a price, a dietary marker and, where the menu gives one, a provenance — maintained carefully enough to be reprinted in June 2026. That information is the best thing Inari has to put on a website, and until now none of it has reached one. This site is mostly an argument that it should.

What the current site gets wrong, and what this one does instead

Read as at 12 August 2026. The strongest three: the menu here is 16 readable pages of Inari's own structured data instead of a link to a print file; booking is a button in the header at 390px and at 1920px instead of a tap inside a hamburger; and the hours say no lunch service, any day in words at the top of the page instead of leaving you to infer it from a gap.

To be fair to what is being critiqued: inari.restaurant is competent, working Squarespace-era work, and its photography is genuinely good — good enough that this redesign leans on it entirely and could not exist without it. Every finding below is about structure and staleness, not craft. A critique that overreaches is worth less at a crit than one that lands, so nothing here is stretched to make a longer list.

inari.restaurant

The menu page contains no menu. It has a hero photograph, one sentence, and two links — one labelled food, one labelled drink. Both leave the site for a PDF.

this redesign

The menu is the page: 16 pages, 17 dishes, each carrying Inari's own description, price and dietary markers as selectable text. It says outright that it is a selection, and Inari's full PDF stays linked for the roughly 28 further dishes, the two set menus and the whole drinks list.

inari.restaurant

The food menu is not a document made for screens. It is press-ready artwork: two A3 landscape spreads carrying crop marks, registration targets, a CMYK colour bar, a greyscale step wedge and the printer's slug — served to a phone as the menu.

inari menu 25 Jun.pdf · 1 · 25/6/2026 14:09

this redesign

Every price, description and marker is real text, laid out for a 390px column. Nothing asks a reader to pinch-zoom an A3 spread. The print furniture that file carries is not hidden either — it is quoted on purpose, because the slug line, the colour bar and the registration marks are where both the data and the palette came from. Quoting a press sheet is honest; pretending a press sheet is a web page is the fault.

inari.restaurant

A superseded drinks menu is still sitting in the page markup — a September 2024 file alongside the August 2025 one. Nothing on the page tells a reader which is current.

Inari_A5DrinksMenu_270924.pdf

this redesign

One menu document is linked, named, and dated where a reader can see it: the slug strip at the top of the menu page carries the filename and its revision timestamp. A stale file cannot hide in the markup here, because provenance is printed rather than implied.

inari.restaurant

An expired promotion is still live, and the page contradicts itself about it. One copy offers 20% off and closes the sentence with during July. A second copy of the same offer drops those two words, so it reads as an open-ended discount with no end date at all.

this redesign

There is no promotion anywhere on this site, and no time-limited claim in any of its copy — so there is nothing here that can expire quietly or be worded two different ways in two places. The only dated thing on the page is a date stated as a date: the menu's revision, and the day this audit was read.

inari.restaurant

The lunch-booking section tells the reader to please call or email our team. No phone number appears anywhere on the site, so half of that instruction cannot be followed.

this redesign

This site prints no number either, because Inari publishes none — but it says so, in the place a reader looks for one, and gives the single channel that does work as a live mailto link. A missing option is a fact; an instruction that cannot be followed is a bug.

inari.restaurant

Under the booking heading, the reservation widget renders as an empty dark rectangle. The action the site most wants a visitor to take is a blank box.

this redesign

The booking page is a student prototype and says so at the top in plain words — it takes no reservation and sends nothing anywhere. What it is not is blank, and it does not depend on a third-party script loading. It also cannot offer a time Inari does not serve: there is no lunch service, so no lunch slot exists to pick.

inari.restaurant

White type is set straight onto busy food photography with nothing behind it. At 390×844 the crop tightens and the type lands on the brightest part of the plate.

this redesign

No text sits on a photograph here without a scrim beneath it, and the scrim is one token applied everywhere rather than a decision re-made per image. Text contrast was measured rather than eyeballed and the ratios are recorded in the stylesheet — including the combination that failed and therefore never ships: black on Inari red is 3.46:1, under the 4.5:1 body minimum.

inari.restaurant

Opening hours and the address live in the footer and nowhere else, and the hours never use the word closed. That lunch is closed every day is something you have to infer from what the list leaves out.

this redesign

The hours say it in words — no lunch service, any day — near the top of this page, and again in the footer of every page beside the address. The exception is stated rather than hinted at: lunch is pre-booked groups of ten or more only.

inari.restaurant

At 390px the BOOK NOW button folds into the hamburger menu. The primary conversion action is one tap further away exactly where taps cost the most.

this redesign

There is no hamburger on this site at any width. Book a Table is a solid red button in the header at 390px and at 1920px, in the same flat row as every other link — visible at the top of this page right now, whichever device you are reading it on.

inari.restaurant

The kitchen maintains dietary information per dish — the printed menu marks GF, DF and V, and keeps a separate celiac-friendly list — and then the whole of it is flattened into print artwork. A diner who needs that information has to open a PDF to get it.

this redesign

Every marker Inari prints sits beside its dish as text, exactly as printed, with the key spelled out: GF gluten free, DF dairy free, V vegetarian. These are Inari's dietary markers, not allergen guarantees, and Inari's own advisory travels with them: Please advise your waiter of any dietary requirements or allergies you may have. Nothing was inferred, extended or generated. Where Inari's own two pages disagree, both readings ship rather than one being quietly chosen — the priced menu says Corn Cobs, the celiac list says Corn Ribs, and the menu page says so.

What this redesign gives up

Completeness. Inari's PDF is the whole menu. This one is 17 dishes of about 45, chosen by which dishes there is a photograph of — so the photo library, not the kitchen, decided what you can read here. The full menu stays one link away for that reason.
The room. There are no interior photographs in the library at all. The interior shapes the neutrals on this site — the near-black is sampled from the darkest pixels of Inari's own food photography rather than set to pure black — but the room itself is never shown, because showing it would mean generating it.
A real booking. Their embed, when it loads, takes an actual reservation. This site's form deliberately sends nothing anywhere, and no amount of design polish makes a prototype a reservation system.
Drinks. The drinks list is not reproduced here in any form. The finding above is that a stale drinks PDF sits in their markup; the fix is not to transcribe a document this project has not verified.
Time. This is a student prototype built in days against a site that serves a working restaurant. It has not been tested with a single one of Inari's actual customers.

Where this design came from

Colour bar + step wedge, page 1 of inari menu 25 Jun.pdf

That strip of swatches is not an illustration of the claim that this palette was sampled from Inari's own material. It is the sample. Every swatch is a pixel lifted out of page 1 of Inari's menu PDF: the process colour bar a printer uses to check ink density, and beneath it the greyscale wedge that checks neutral balance. They are on this page for the same reason a proof carries them — so the colour can be checked against its source rather than taken on trust.

Inari red is #C41411, and it came from Inari's own booking configuration, where the restaurant states it as a hex value — not from an eyedropper on a screenshot. Sampling the PDF's red panels instead gives #9D0320, which is what happens when CMYK artwork is rendered with no colour profile: a darker, pinker red that is a conversion artifact rather than a brand colour. That second red still ships, but only as the fill behind large flooded panels, where it measures 8.51:1 against white — never as the mark. The distinction is the reason the sourcing order is written down: published brand values first, the artifact second, our own judgement last.

The type was identified before it was replaced. Inari's site sets its display face in Uchiyama — which is both licensed to their platform rather than to us, and squarely the decorative brush category the brief rejects by name. The display face here is Bricolage Grotesque, a contemporary grotesque with deliberate irregularity in its terminals, chosen against the logo's hand-cut block capitals rather than against an idea of Japan. There is no brush script on this site, no torii, no rising sun and no cherry blossom.

Everything here that looks like print production is doing a print production job. The slug strip at the top of every page says what this document is and who made it. Crop marks say where a block of facts ends. Registration marks sit where two things have to line up — the two on this page mark the audit's two columns and this palette. If a mark cannot answer what job it does, it is not on the page.

Credits, permission, and what this is not

Photography

Every photograph on this site is Inari's own. Photo credit: Inari. They are used with the manager's permission, on the condition that they are not monetised — this site carries no advertising, no affiliate link and no payment of any kind. No image here is AI-generated: no invented dish, no invented room, no invented staff.

Menu data

Transcribed from Inari's food menu, June 2026 — inari menu 25 Jun.pdf, revision 25/6/2026 14:09. 17 dishes of about 45. Names, descriptions, prices and dietary markers are reproduced as printed and nothing was inferred, extended or generated. Where this site and Inari's menu disagree, Inari's menu is right.

What this is not

This is not Inari's website. It is an unofficial student redesign, built for COMP4020 at the Australian National University, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Inari. Nothing on it can take a booking, and no price on it should be trusted over Inari's own menu.

Read the menu here Inari's real website