La Bottarga

Summary

La Bottarga is a self-initiated project: a complete brand for a chef-driven fusion restaurant. The kind of place that could sit in Rome or just as easily in Tel Aviv. Cosmopolitan, ingredient-led, aimed at a young crowd that treats eating out as part of the scene. I named it after bottarga, an unusual ingredient, and built everything outward from there: the identity, original hand-drawn illustrations, the menu, and the site.

The Problem

A restaurant brand has to do something most brands don't. It becomes part of the meal. It sits on the table, in your hands, while you're deciding what to eat.

And this concept resisted the two obvious templates. A chef's fusion kitchen, careful and creative, built on fresh local ingredients, in a cosmopolitan city, at mid-to-high prices, for a young crowd that comes for the cocktails and the scene as much as for the food.

Traditional fine dining would read stuffy and repel exactly that crowd. Trendy casual would read generic and undersell the kitchen. The brand had to be refined and unfussy at the same time.

My Role and Approach

Self-initiated, so every call was mine: naming, identity, illustration, menu, and site.

The name does the first piece of work. Bottarga is an unusual ingredient, not one most diners can name. That is exactly why I chose it. A name built on a singular ingredient promises what the kitchen promises: specific, original, made with care. The brand starts making its argument before anyone reads a line of the menu.

Then I built the tension into the visuals. A modern sans-serif wordmark, clean and contemporary, set against meticulous black-and-white line illustrations of raw ingredients. The typography says now. The drawings say craft and patience. Holding both at once is the whole point: a kitchen doing careful, unhurried work for a young, contemporary room.

Ingredients, not plated dishes. I illustrated raw materials rather than finished plates. Plated food dates quickly and commits the brand to a specific menu. Ingredients say what the kitchen is built on, and they let the identity stay true as the seasonal menu changes.

The Solution

• Brand identity: a modern sans-serif wordmark, with bright solid color as the graphic key against a clean, minimal base.
• Original hand-drawn illustrations of ingredients, in black-and-white line work, running across the whole brand.

• The menu, where the illustrations do the most work and the brand is physically in the diner's hands.

• A homepage carrying the same restraint: clean, minimal, generous white space, with the illustrations and the color key doing the talking.

Result

A complete brand world for a restaurant that doesn't exist: name, identity, illustration system, menu, and site, all in one voice.

It's self-initiated, so there are no business results to report and I won't invent any. What it demonstrates is range held together in a single piece: naming, brand thinking, original illustration, and web design, with one deliberate tension (modern type against classical line work) carried consistently across every surface.

The homepage currently exists as a static design. Building it live is the next thing I want to do with it.