This is a student project, so nothing was actually printed, published, or built for Abends Sausage Lounge, which is a fictional company.
There are plenty of fast-casual eateries in the United States that are wildly popular and successful. Most of them serve familiar types of cuisine: Panera serves soups and sandwiches; Chipotle serves burritos; Punch Pizza serves Neapolitan pizza; Noodles & Co serves pasta dishes. Likewise, every city has at least one restaurant that is German themed, but always in an over-the-top fashion (think lederhosen and Oktoberfest). But there aren’t any well-known, contemporary fast-casual restaurants that specialize in sausages from Germany. This is the idea behind Abends.
To make this idea real, a lively colour palette is paired with complimentary wood stain and subway tile, and applied to a classic American restaurant atmosphere that is warm, inviting, and places focus on the food rather than the food’s romanticized ethnic origin (no lederhosen to found here).
Abends Sausage Lounge is a fast-casual style restaurant that serves a wildly popular German street food, called Currywurst, to an American market. The goal was to take a cheap meal and class it up in order to turn it into something that Americans might enjoy eating, without making it seem too German but also not completely ignoring the food’s Germanic origins.
The brand was inspired by locally based as well as nationally franchised fast-casual eateries, such as Chipotle, Punch Pizza, and My Burger. With sausages being the main dish served at Abends, it was particularly useful to incorporate some cheeky humor and mild innuendo in order to spark interest in a market that doesn’t generally consider sausage dishes as a staple.
This is a student project, so nothing was actually printed, published, or built for Abends Sausage Lounge, which is a fictional company.
The result of this project was a light brand that could be translated across the interior and exterior of an actual location, environmental graphics including a massive menu board and floor to ceiling vinyl decals, and a carefully planed menu that appeals to a wide segment of the population. The atmosphere of Abends is comfortable, quirky, and fits easily into a trendy city neighbourhood or a cookie-cutter suburban strip mall.
