Caccia & Tails
Brief
Elisa Furci has grown up with Italian food, spending her formative years helping her mother (an Italian New Yorker) in the family run ‘Spaghetti Junction’ restaurant here in Brighton. Her young adult life has been spent following a career running various restaurants in the ever evolving London restaurant scene.
Elisa has now returned to Brighton and her first love of Italian food to open an Italian street food restaurant in Lewes, East Sussex. The first of many to come in her ambitious business plan. The restaurant follows the classic Sciamadda tradition of serving freshly made food to be eaten at the counter or on the go. The speciality will be Genovese Focaccia and simple Italian cocktails, hence the name ‘Caccia & Tails’.
The restaurant concept demonstrates a contemporary twist on a traditional format, but the real uniqueness comes from it’s speciality of Genovese Focaccia. This bread is unique to Genova, the town from which her father (an Italian Jazz musician) hails. It’s traditionally made with a crust of salt on top and it’s encouraged to be eaten upside down ‘Sotto Soppra’ so the tongue gets the full salt hit.
Solution
Our investigation of the traditional Sciamadda lead us to discover a beautiful array of classic sign writing and Italian typography which informed our choice of typeface, a distinctive Condensed Gothic. However, in order to make this uniquely ours we created our own typeface using an engraver’s linear chamfer to reference some of the old sign-makers techniques. The font comes in 3 different weights and is designed to be overlaid to allow the user to mix a variety of backgrounds, shadows and outline colours. The colour pallet references the dusty pink and orange hues from the traditional houses in the Genovese old town.
The Lewes restaurant is now running at full steam with another restaurant planned for Brighton by 2020. The brand identity has been successfully applied to environment, packaging, screen and print and is preparing for world domination!
