Kitchen on Common
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 marketing system which allowed founder Joh Kokubo to update the menu easily as part of a too-busy schedule. They also needed an identity that balanced distinctiveness with a home-spun appeal that fit right into Cushing Square's quaint aesthetic.
We worked closely with the founder to create two distinct logos for the restaurant. The primary logo (a stacked version with distinctive stripes), is used for the restaurants menu, ads and other marketing materials; an inline version serves as the restaurant's sign. The menu design is flexible; a printed shell provides the base, and a template was created that Joh could update in-house as the menu changed. The updated menus are printed in-house on a laser printer, and a rubber stamp on the front designates the lunch and dinner menus. The website incorporates downloadable PDF files (also templated) of the menu, which changes as often as every two weeks during New England's growing season.