Má Pêche by Asher Sarlin

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CLIENT

One of four restau­rants in New York, NY, from Momo­fuku, a crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed restau­rant group by chef David Chang based in New York with mul­ti­ple loca­tions in Aus­tralia and Toron­to, Cana­da. Momo­fuku has also pro­duced sev­er­al cook­books, and releas­es a quar­ter­ly jour­nal with McSweeny’s called Lucky Peach.

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BRIEF

Momo­fuku approached me to cre­ate an iden­ti­ty for Má Pêche, their restau­rant in the Cham­bers Hotel in Mid­town Man­hat­tan. The goal was to retain the brand’s min­i­mal style while push­ing it into a more cre­ative and play­ful space with­in the typ­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive con­text of Mid­town. Ulti­mate­ly the cre­ative brief extend­ed to a refresh of the icon­ic Momo­fuku peach, to be used on future mate­ri­als across their restau­rants and gen­er­al brand­ing (social, web, etc).

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APPROACH

Upon research­ing the his­to­ry of mid­town Man­hat­tan, I found the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, par­tic­u­lar­ly in its hey­day dur­ing the ear­ly and mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, to be the per­fect com­bi­na­tion of cre­ativ­i­ty and sophis­ti­ca­tion to infer Má Pêche’s iden­ti­ty. Ref­er­enc­ing the block type of ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry prim­i­tivism, the min­i­mal col­or and shape com­bi­na­tions of Ellsworth Kel­ly and Jean Arp, and the imper­fect, tac­tile qual­i­ty of Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, my solu­tion was intend­ed to mar­ry the cre­ativ­i­ty and con­fi­dence of David Chang with that of past artis­tic vision­ar­ies cel­e­brat­ed in Mid­town. Ulti­mate­ly the Má Pêche peach mark itself has been extend­ed to gen­er­al Momo­fuku print and web branding.

In our very first meeting with Asher, we narrowed down the visual identity of Má Pêche. His main goal was to understand the ethos behind the restaurant, even though he already had a very strong understanding of what Momofuku, as a company, and David Chang, the owner, were all about. We knew that we wanted to evoke the era when midtown was the center of New York City and tap into the nostalgia of midtown’s heyday. From all of this knowledge, Asher took influences from the Golden Era of midtown, and created a visual identity that we would have never been able to come up with on our own. Through design, he helped us articulate and formulate the identity of our restaurant.  — Sue Chan, Public Relations and Marketing of Momofuku