México espectacular

One of our favorite clients and good friend, Larry Nicola, came to us recently and asked us to work on a new restaurant, Mexico. We had worked with Larry on Nic’s, Beverly Hills, and now Larry wanted to open a restaurant that would feature traditional Mexican food with the best ingredients, and Larry’s amazing culinary flair. In our first meeting, he said he’d like it to feel like a great evening in Puerto Vallarta or Tiajuana, minus the part where you wake up the next morning on the street with no recollection of what you’ve done. We approached the project with a low-tech philosophy. If we could do something by hand, we did, if we could manufacture something cheaper, we did. We did a huge amount of research, collecting Mexican restaurant menus from everywhere. Not surprisingly, they were wonderful. And we created a fictional person who would design everything. This person would be a restaurant employee with no design training, but a huge amount of enthusiasm and passion; someone who would give every piece her all with the very best intentions, but just get it wrong. We even convinced the off-the-shelf menu company to make the very low cost menu holders in turquoise, which they repeatedly reminded us might be garish. And?