Caserne’s crumbled type captures Olive + Gourmando’s organised chaos

Since opening its doors in Old Montreal in 1998, Olive + Gourmando has built a reputation as a culinary institution where the boundaries between bakery, café and restaurant blur into something distinctly its own. The homemade approach that has kept locals queuing and tourists seeking it out for over 25 years presented a unique challenge when the time came to expand beyond its original Saint-Paul Street location. How do you bottle the feeling of a beloved neighbourhood spot and take it somewhere else without losing what made it special in the first place? Montreal-based studio Caserne faced this question head-on when tasked with refreshing the brand’s identity to support its growth into a restaurant chain. “Olive + Gourmando is a beloved Old Montreal institution, known for its homemade daytime cuisine,” explains Senior Designer Marie Chénier. “Since its opening in 1998, the restaurant’s identity is raw and welcoming, but it was lacking a cohesive visual system to tie it all together.” The challenge wasn’t just about creating something that looked good – it was about capturing something intangible. “Expanding with new locations, our main challenge was to capture the soul of the original Olive + Gourmando while making it scalable and easy to recreate elsewhere.” The original restaurant’s charm lay partly in its organised chaos – the energy of a space where everything is made on-site, where generous stacks of pastries tower behind the counter, and where the walls themselves tell a story through their worn terracotta hue. Previously, this character expressed itself through chalk textures, doodles, and handwritten elements that gave the space its artisanal feel. Caserne’s task was to preserve this authenticity while building a system that could travel. “We wanted to preserve the artisanal charm and the warmth you feel when you step into the original Olive + Gourmando,” says Chénier. “Everything there is homemade, and that is truly important to the owners. Our goal was to keep that authenticity, by embracing imperfection with an organic and playful feel.”