By Garth Johnston, ZAGAT.com staff writer
Learn how Louise Fili creates a restaurant's brand from the logo to the bill.
Graphic designer Louise Fili helps restaurants refine their identities through typography.
Photo: Henry Leutwyler, courtesy of Louise Fili
To stand out in any cluttered urban dining landscape, a new restaurant
needs more than a talented chef and attractive dining room – it needs
an identity. While architectural design firms usually get the lion's
share of credit for how a restaurant presents itself, such praise
overlooks the work of graphic designers, whose contributions can be
just as crucial. A restaurant’s logo helps set the tone of the meal to
follow, from the signage outside to the typography on the menu. First
impressions are vital in the ultracompetitive restaurant biz, and
executing those few letters and occasional graphic just the right way
is crucial. (See our slideshow of restaurant logos here.)
In the crowded field of talented graphic designers who work with the NYC restaurant industry – firms of note include Mucca (Balthazar, Pastis) and Memo (Pizzeria Mozza, Enoteca San Marco) – Louise Fili stands out. After designing more than 2,000 book covers for Pantheon Books, she formed her own company, Louise Fili LTD., and shifted her focus to restaurants. Her work in the field has garnered three James Beard nominations (two for her work with the late NYC restaurants Monzu and Bolivar and a third for a food book) and can be seen in the logos and menus of Gotham restaurants all over town, including Artisanal, Mermaid Inn, Picholine and Sfoglia.
"My experiences with her have been nothing short of wonderful,” said restaurateur Danny Abrams, who has worked with Fili on The Harrison and Mermaid Inn. “She has a way of thinking about logos and graphics that ties the whole thing together."
On a recent afternoon in her airy office in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, Fili sat down with the Buzz to explain the process of branding a restaurant.
Creating the Logo
Designers normally become involved late in a restaurant’s gestation, a month or two before the projected opening night ("projected" being the operative word, of course). But occasionally designers get involved as early as the concept stage – before the name is finalized. “Sometimes a restaurateur will ask me ‘can’t you just work around [the lack of a name]?’” laughed Fili. “They just think that they can come up with any name and whatever we do with it can make it good, and pronounceable.”
Once Fili gets on board, the first order of business is “a big discussion about the restaurant, what it is, what kind of clientele they expect and what they want the logo to do for them.” The exterior presentation of the logo – aka the signage – can have a major impact on the design. “It can’t be a very long logo if there is a short space for it so we have to take that into consideration very early on,” she added.
Strong logos embrace the spirit of a place, and Fili’s are no exception. When Nantucket’s Sfoglia decided to open an outpost on New York’s Upper East Side it turned to Fili to reimagine its brand. She returned with a coat of arms decorated with pasta shapes instead of weapons, held up by two muses, with the names of the restaurant’s two locations on the banner below. Another fun Fili creation is the logo for Steak Frites, which features a cow in a striped shirt and beret who blows a line of smoke around the restaurant’s name.
Making the Menu
A graphic designer provides restaurants with not only a logo, but also menus, check presenters, wine lists and more.
The range of menu types and styles can be dizzying, with variations ranging from a single sheet of paper typed in Microsoft Word to an elaborate bound book created with a professional design program like Adobe InDesign. It’s not merely an aesthetic choice: price variations on paper stock and bindings can add considerably to the bottom line.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time we end up going with a sleeve,” said Fili, referring to the clear plastic that contains the piece of paper. “A lot of owners have a preconceived notion that sleeves are down-market, like coffee shops. But they don’t have to be that way.” Durability is also key – because menus are passed between dozens of hands each day, they need to be able to take the wear and tear gracefully, or the restaurant will have to keep ordering – and spending – more.
The end product must be flexible enough for frequent updates. “The design is about 1% of my work,” said Fili, “and the rest is figuring out how to do it so it doesn’t get messed up.” A restaurant needs to be able to change its menu on the fly, so designers employ a variety of techniques to facilitate this, from leaving a blank area on the menu to training the front-of-house staff (and sometimes even the chef) to use graphic design programs. To make sure everything runs smoothly, Fili and her assistants generally come in prior to the opening to walk employees through the whole process. And to keep the design from degrading after too many edits, they'll sometimes come back a year or two later to offer a refresher course.
Something to Remember the Meal By
When it first opened, the Mermaid Inn gave customers their bill in carefully opened and cleaned sardine tins.
At the end of the meal, the graphic designer still has the opportunity to make the experience memorable for diners through check presenters and keepsakes. For years, matchbooks have been de rigueur, but in an age of near-universal smoking bans, some NYC restaurants have been complementing them – like La Goulue – or replacing them – like Telepan – with scratchpads. And still others have replaced toothpicks for matchsticks. Charlie Palmer’s Metrazur used to give out luggage tags – fully functional, complete with a string – in place of the usual business card. Designed by Fili, this novelty makes reference to the New American’s location in New York’s Grand Central Station.
Whimsical check presenters can help take the sting off the bill, but two of Fili’s most adventurous vessels were quickly sabotaged by over-appreciative guests. In a now defunct TriBeCa trattoria called Pace, waiters would bring the check inside elegant Italian paperback novels – only to have the books disappear into customers' pockets one by one. Initially at the original East Village Mermaid Inn, the bill was served in sardine tins that had been painstakingly bent open, scrubbed clean of their sardine odor and brushed with clear nail polish to dull the edges. Unfortunately, the lure of a half-opened can was too much for many customers, and one by one the presenters were ripped open and made unusable. Still others were taken home as souvenirs by guests.
"Who steals a sardine can?" wonders Mermaid Inn owner Abrams. The restaurant now uses a standard presenter that credit card companies provide free of charge.