Brand Bible

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All work by Mucca Design

how To Brand

a resTauranT











My rst thought is, “No.” As an Italian, I believe that

the food should always be the “protagonist”—the sole

reason why we eat at a particular restaurant. For

Italians, generally, this is true. But because we’re in

America, where food is primarily the protagonist

in an obesity epidemic, restaurants need design.

Restaurants need design not to create appetite, but to

add to the culinary experience.



Matteo Bologna

Mucca Design

20

Creating design as

delectable as the

cuisine it represents

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





Absolutely. Design is something that comes between

you and the experience of tasting the food. It’s not

necessary. When you go to Italy, some of the best

restaurants are ugly, but the food is amazing. Here,

we live in a dierent context. Traditionally, food here

is bad. People eat mostly packaged food provided

by corporations. But in the last twenty years in the

United States, there has been a movement led by

people like Alice Waters, who have helped food to

reclaim the importance it should have had from the

very beginning. There are two groups related to this.

There is a group of chefs who are trying to improve

the quality of food, and who have actually succeeded

quite well. And there are other chefs who are trying

to improve or add to the experience.



As designers, we’re setting the stage. We have to help

the customer enjoy every moment in the restaurant.

Everything we do is about giving personality to a

venue so that the event remains very memorable for

the customer. The design and materials we create

for the restaurant help to elevate the food in a very

particular way, without interfering in the relation-

ship between the customer and the food.





For a restaurant, the design should be transparent

and functional. A menu should be easy to read, so

the customer can nd things easily: You don’t want

to spend too much time reading a long page of text.

Usually, we design in such a way so that the menu

is easy to scan—this way, the customer can give a

quick look at it and know what to get. For the restau-

rateur, our design is functional in the sense that it

needs to promote certain items to help facilitate a

certain experience during the evening. Or get rid

of old sh [laughs]. Either way, our job is to high-

light certain items that are more protable or more

signicant for the restaurant’s identity.







The menu is denitely a unique canvas. When

you design a menu, you need a lot of experience to

achieve certain goals that your client has. Menus

have a lot of rules that are very subtle—but every

specialty in design has specic rules. Book jackets

have their own rules. Signage has its own rules.

 



Branding for

Brooklyn Fare, a

grocery store, using a

custom typeface

All work by Mucca Design

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