Tzatziki Restaurant Branding
First, a backstory…
This brand creation started out with a simple class assignment: brand a restaurant. This was the first time in my design education that I knew right off the bat the kind of restaurant I wanted to create. Ever since I was a young kid, my mother and her sisters loved Greek food. I am not sure where that love came from, other than it being absolutely delicious. My mom made Greek “Gyros” almost weekly, trying various recipes, constantly on the search for that perfect restaurant quality Greek food. Now, my mom is a great cook, and to me all the dishes she made tasted delicious. Nevertheless, she was on a continuous search for perfection, that, in her eye, she was never able to attain. Fast forward to when I was 12 years old, and upon moving to a new city, my mom was shocked to discover that our new town only had three Greek restaurants, all of which closed within a year of us being here. I know. For this reason, I chose to create Tzatziki. The name comes from a traditional sauce used in Greek food. This yogurt-based sauce was my mom’s nemesis. While it is delicious, and every time she made it, I could eat the stuff with a spoon, my mom was never satisfied with her recipe. She was consistently making delicious food, but the recipe for Tzatziki was never quite right to her.
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The Process
When I started off, the only ideas I had for this brand concept was what I did NOT want the brand to look like. All three of those restaurants that closed had similar concepts: traditional Greek décor, compete with fake grapes and murals of the Greek landscapes. Their names were usually derived from the family that owned them, and their logos and menus were famously difficult to read, featuring fonts that looked like they came straight out of ancient Greek manuscripts. Therefore, I wanted my brand to be modern, simple, and accessible to people who might have never eaten Greek food before. The restaurant should be welcoming and generic, the menu easy to navigate, and the dishes simple and appealing, even if you don’t speak Greek.
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Interior Signage for Tzatziki Restaurant
The Brand
The brand I developed is named Tzatziki. The restaurant would be a Greek-American fusion restaurant that featured all the traditional dishes but that are easy to understand and appealing if you are new to the work of Greek cuisine. I designed a logo that centers around a handwritten script font with three straight bars surrounding it. Now, let me tell you something about those bars. Linework is a popular trend in design in 2018, but my reasoning for incorporating it goes far deeper. The Greek flag is made up of three vertical bars. While I was very adamant that I wanted to stay away from the other restaurants that centered their whole aesthetic around Greek culture, I did not want to forget it entirely. So, I added the three bars in the logo to reference the flag without directly representing it.
