Turning inked vegetables into letterforms, Dennis delivers a homegrown brand for Superlocal

Superlocal, a restaurant in the Port Olímpic, believes that everything you need to run a restaurant can be found close to home. While eating local is nothing new in hospitality, Superlocal takes the idea to new heights. From the food to the interiors, everything at the restaurant is sourced from within a 99.99km radius – even the table legs rescued from antique markets, and the recycled plastic bottles that form a glinting chandelier. Their core belief of eating and living local had to be underpinned in their identity, and this is something Barcelona and London-based branding and design studio Dennis understood immediately. From the very get-go, the project wasn’t without its challenges. The team knew they wanted to avoid clichés and not rely on the all-too-familiar language of sustainability. “With themes like sustainability and local produce, there’s always a risk of slipping into greenwashing or looking like an environmental NGO,” Creative Director Josh Nathanson tells us. “We wanted to do something worthy of a restaurant identity; we wanted to celebrate what’s close to home, and prove you don’t have to look far for good ingredients or good design.” The eureka moment came soon, when someone in the studio asked, “What if the whole identity was made from local produce?” And so, the team went for a bit of grocery shopping, picking up locally grown onions, aubergines, artichokes and lemons. The idea was to stamp letterforms from the produce – dipped in ink – ones that could be included in the branding. “It turned out that a full alphabet made from stamped foods looked a little too playful... more like a school project than a hospitality brand! Given that Superlocal is a ‘fine casual dining’ concept, we needed to steer it toward something more elevated,” explains Designer Marina Coll. “That’s when we zoomed in on just the ‘O’ in Superlocal. By creating a rotating set of stamps to replace that one letter, we found a metaphor for the 99.99km radius from which all ingredients are sourced, and a way to balance playfulness with sophistication.”