Restaurant Florent^295
M&Co.In 1986 a chef named Florent Morlet opened
an inexpensive French restaurant in New
York City’s unsavory meatpacking district.
Without any investors and little capital, he
rented a funky old luncheonette that had
recently gone out of business. His intent was
to remain unpretentious (and still appeal to
an exclusive clientele), yet Restaurant
Florent did require the basic promotional
materials, such as menus, business cards, and
a sign. For these graphics he hired M&Co.,
a New York firm known for experimental
commercial art. Tibor Kalman ( 1949 – 1999 ),
M&Co.’s creative director, suggested that
Florent keep all the fixtures, furniture,
utensils, and the sign that the previous
greasy spoon had left behind. “Let the
restaurant design itself,” said Kalman.
The menu designed itself too. Kalman decided that to be
consistent with the restaurant’s overall ambiance the menu should look like
a printer had thrown it together. He would have gone to a place where they
print typical Greek coffee shop menus, “but we felt that the result wouldn’t
be quite as effective as what a job printer might do, because those other
printers are imitating designed things,” he explained. Instead the menu
looks as though it had been pieced together in a few hours using random
type from a letterpress type case. Nevertheless, it took two months to
design. “If we weren’t trained designers it would have taken less time,” said
Kalman. “The difference between something really wonderful and really
horrible is very close.”
M&Co. designed Florent’s first announcement using a mundane
exterior photograph of the restaurant (the kind used for common diner
postcards). For the second they made an original design and printed it on a
coarse chipboard paper stock. Kalman decided to illustrate the idea of a
restaurant through little pictographs lifted straight from the Manhattan
Yellow Pages. The result was a kind of rebus with a chair representing the
restaurant, a truck representing the address, a gun representing New York