TOWN RESTAURANT MENU
The client for this project was TOWN, a fictional fine dining restaurant specializing in Asian cuisine.
The brief was to create a menu, brochure, and a table tent promotion.
The client’s mission statement, logo, brand colors and font choices were already in place, so I began by studying them to get a sense of the client’s personality.
Almost immediately, the first challenge I foresaw was the predominant association in America of Asian food with casual dining. This was reinforced by the short questionnaire I prepared and shared among my colleagues and friends. Fine dining as a concept largely meant French, or very modern American cuisine. Asian cuisine, with the possible exception of high-end sushi restaurants, was seen as confined to take out, or casual dim sum experiences. Asian menus were full of glossy, saturated photos that made it easier to choose an “exotic” or unfamiliar dish.
I decided to tackle this bias by avoiding the use of color photography altogether, and instead created a design based on clean, minimal elements, with an emphasis on color and typography that reflected TOWN’s fine dining aesthetic .
Since there was no specification beyond the moniker “Asian” in the original brief, I decided to make TOWN a restaurant which celebrated the richness of regional Chinese cuisine. I invented the promotion for the table tent as a way to build on the brand of TOWN and its stated mission of providing a unique dining experience for astute and sophisticated clients.
For the menu I arranged the individual items vertically, across a single page tabloid-style layout to reflect a sense of generosity, as well as to show how the specialties of various regions come together as a whole. The variation in the columns and right alignment were meant to suggest the form of a cityscape, a subtle nod to TOWN’s name and its urban location. The number of columns and menu items were limited, and based around the number six, which is considered a fortunate number in Chinese culture and tied in with TOWN’s logo, a symbol of good fortune meant to welcome guests. The individual dishes were authentic to the region they represented.
Based not only on my research into Asian cuisine, but also on my personal experiences having lived in Asia for several years, I sought to create a design that was culturally respectful as well as supportive of the client’s needs.
