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.

Big Fresh Café offers something a bit different to the folks working along Route 30 in Framingham: healthy, fresh options for lunch and dinner, reasonably priced, and locally sourced whenever possible. Having already built a reputation in the neighborhood as a great alternative to the string of chain restaurants along route 30, owner Karen Masterson decided it was time to create a website that would give local residents easy access to menu information, directions, and catering options.

See the website in action at bigfreshfood.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