Estúdio Gole gives Côt Parrilla an identity where East meets West

Côt Parrilla is a restaurant in Leblon, a neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, that began as a delivery-only ‘dark’ kitchen before moving into a place of its own. That shift called for an identity strong enough to support the new phase and stand out in a competitive food scene, with the restaurant turning to Brazilian design studio Estúdio Gole to create it. The restaurant’s concept turns on a meeting of East and West: Korean and Eastern barbecue techniques brought to a contemporary parrilla, the Argentine and wider South American style of grill, set against Western cuts and references. The decision that shaped the identity was one of degree – how far to let that meeting show, and how much to hold back. From the first conversations, the client was clear that the combination “could be the biggest challenge of this project,” Gabriel Miranda, Partner at Estúdio Gole, tells us, so the studio set out to “understand in depth how much of this scale could be expressive or more subtle,” and defined that as “the success factor for this language to work.”