Kitchen on Common provides Belmont, MA’s Cushing Square residents with a unique experience: fresh, simple, gorgeous food, with an obsessive focus on local and seasonal ingredients. Given a constantly changing menu dependent on season and relationships with local farmers, the restaurant needed a website which allowed founder Joh Kokubo to update the menu whenever it changed. It also, however, needed to be visually appealing to local residents who were curious about the food.

The answer? A highly visual site with links to downloadable PDFs of the lunch and dinner menus. Customers can download them off the website and see what’s available, and Joh can update the menu every time it changes as easily as dragging a file into a folder. See the site in action at kitchenoncommon.com.

Kitchen on Common opened in Belmont’s Cushing Square neighborhood in September of 2007. Prior to the launch, founder Joh Kokubo came to the zen kitchen to create the restaurant’s identity, menu and website. 

The restaurant provides Cushing Square residents with a unique experience: fresh, simple, gorgeous food, with an obsessive focus on local and seasonal ingredients. The identity needed to accomplish a few things: it needed to communicate the simple elegance of the food while remaining friendly; it had to work well against the colors that Joh had chosen for the restaurant’s decor; and it needed to make the restaurant feel like it was part of the neighborhood already, while also being distinctive enough to be noticed.

The answer? A simple stacked logo for the primary materials, with a related but simplified version for the restaurant’s signage. Since the unveiling of the identity, Kitchen on Common has definitely gotten noticed, and it’s now become a popular neighborhood spot.

Work done for Kitchen on Common included:

• Menu template
• Business Cards
• Promotional Website
• Signage

Kitchen on Common opened in Belmont’s Cushing Square neighborhood in September of 2007. Prior to the launch, founder Joh Kokubo came to the zen kitchen to create the restaurant’s identity, menu and website. 

The restaurant provides Cushing Square residents with a unique experience: fresh, simple, gorgeous food, with an obsessive focus on local and seasonal ingredients. The restaurant’s small dining room also makes Kitchen on Common a popular take-out option, which meant that the menu presented several challenges: it had to be used for both people looking for takeout and dine-in options, it had to be updateable by Joh on a weekly basis (or more often), and it had to be used for both dinner and lunch.

The answer? A printed shell of the menu, along with customizable templates for both lunch and dinner menus. A rubber stamp on the front helps designate the lunch from the dinner menu and adds a homespun touch.