Wursthall is the creation of Kenji López-Alt, chef mastermind, author, and New York Times columnist. Kenji’s cookbook “The Food Lab” forever changed scrambled eggs for me (look it up), and there are many more dishes I’ve added to my repertoire from his archives at Serious Eats. To say the least, Kenji has inspired me as a home cook and foodie for many years. So naturally, when he and the team at Wursthall approached me to refresh their brand, I was floored by the opportunity.

Wursthall is so much more than brats (which they do exceptionally well) and beer (which they have plenty of). There’s a smorgasbord of classic Bavarian comfort foods to wash down with a boot of your favorite German suds, but there are also experimental dishes like Kenji’s Korean/NNashville Hot Fried Chicken Sandwich waiting to surprise and delight patrons.

Their existing brand did little more than subtly identify this foodie haven 20 minutes south of San Francisco that people from all over the Bay Area would gladly drive over an hour to line up and experience.

At the time, Wursthall’s explosive popularity put them on a path to expand further south to San Jose’s Santana Row, with a possible third location on the horizon. Their existing brand did not convey their story in a compelling way and was not built for scalability or memorability, for that matter.

My primary goal was to create an iconic brand full of fun surprises that would match the energy of the food and the experience of the place. As well as defining a turnkey design system that could be effortlessly replicated as the business grew. I identified with Wursthall’s California approach to German cuisine, which is to experiment and elevate in a way that results in something new and exciting. We wanted the brand identity to feel fresh and relevant to a local California audience and become a memorable part of the experience.

This was achieved with a fresh and bright color palette that felt authentic to a West Coast experience, a playful array of iconic illustrations, classic typography treatments that conveyed a time-honored and local experience, a handful of off-the-wall memorable taglines, and a mascot named “Frank” to lead the viewer through this fun and playful world.