Chester and Loki Cafe
First Principles
"The friction was expensive commercial kitchen overhead before validating demand. The solution: a proof-of-concept cafe that doubles as a live product-testing lab."
Chester and Loki is a passion-project café brand built on AI-powered production workflows. Instead of expensive re-shoots and bloated dev timelines, I used AI to compress both the creative and technical sides of the launch.
From One Photo Shoot to a Full Drink Menu
Instead of re-shooting every drink variant, I photographed a small set of hero product shots — real, well-lit drink photography captured by me — and used AI image generation to iterate new drink versions from those assets. Changing colors, ingredients, and garnishes across dozens of menu items without touching a camera again. A single shoot became a scalable visual menu pipeline, dramatically cutting production time while maintaining a consistent, premium look across the entire catalog.
Building the Site with AI Coding Agents
The Chester and Loki website was built using AI-agentic code development — leveraging AI coding agents to architect, iterate, and deploy the site. This approach accelerated development speed while maintaining clean, production-ready output. The codebase itself is a proof of concept for how AI-agentic workflows compress the timeline from idea to live product.
Pressure-Testing Recipes Before Scaling
Every menu item is an experiment in product-market fit. Rather than betting everything on a full café launch, Chester and Loki serves as a low-risk testing ground where real customer purchases validate what to scale next. The people who show up and order are the signal.
Menu
Testimonial
Talent Acquisition
Download my resume for a complete chronological breakdown of my career timeline and systems history.
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