Restaurant and café branding in Dubai

High-end food and beverage in Dubai is cafés, restaurants and the hospitality groups that run several of them, selling a table to a guest who chose it on a phone. The guest meets the brand in four places: the menu, the room, the packaging and the social feed. When the four agree, the room the guest walks into is the one they booked.

A restaurant brand has to work on the fascia, on the menu and on a phone screen in the same afternoon. The menu is the piece a guest holds longest, so its type, its order and its paper carry more of the brand than the logo does. In the room the brand is at full size: the signage, the uniforms, the table setting and the wall the guests photograph. On the bag, the cup and the box it leaves the building. And the feed is where the next guest decides, so the photography and the reels have to show the room as it is.

Alternative Space designs the identity, the menu, the packaging and the content. The mark, the palette and the type are drawn for the fascia and the menu first, then applied to the packaging, the uniforms and the interior direction. One list feeds the printed menu and the phone menu, so the QR version is a page that reads on a screen rather than a PDF that has to be pinched. The website carries the menu, the booking and the story of the place, and the social content is photographed and filmed in the room and cut from the same shoot as the launch.

For Lento, an all-day restaurant in Addis Ababa, the studio designed the identity: the wordmark and the motif, aubergine and mustard on cream, the signature line, the collateral, the packaging, the menu, the interior direction and the guidelines. The idea came first. Every restaurant sells food and rents time; Lento sells the hour itself, and the identity was drawn from that line. The identity for The Meal Plant, grown from one star, is below with it.

The work runs from restaurant branding and menu design to takeaway packaging, the website and the reels for the feed, for a single café, a restaurant or a group with several rooms. It includes the pieces a guest handles on every visit: the menu, the bill folder, the loyalty card, the cup and the bag, designed for the print run they will get, so the artwork that is approved is the artwork that arrives.

The way in is one conversation about the place: the room, the menu, the guest and the opening date. From that the studio proposes the scope and the order the pieces are made in. The enquiry below starts it.