California-based Tavistock Restaurants focuses on incubating restaurant concepts that combine great food and escapist experiences under the same roof. Their successful brands expand to multiple locations while avoiding the sameness and loss of quality that befalls so many “chains.”
For Zed 451, Napa Valley Grille, and California Cafe, they wanted to extend these brands online with the same sort of immersive experiences they deliver in their physical locations.
Zed 451, a brand refined and concepted in web and print by FINE at its inception, shows rich black and vibrantly colored imagery to match the sumptuous and entertaining decor in their restaurants. They announce their points of differentiation in a series of print and online ads with headlines like “Food should not be ordered; it should come willingly.”
Napa Valley Grille takes an interactive scrapbook approach, creating a site where artifacts from an imagined trip to Napa Valley are scattered on a table right alongside the content for a page and menus specific to each location. It becomes a site compelling enough to entice customers in, for instance, New Jersey, that a dinner at their local Napa Valley Grille is indeed an escape to Napa.
Finally, California Cafe’s web concept reflects the idea of a gourmet food and lifestyle magazine. Not only do the stark home page images remind you of this approach, but the site is configured for easy seasonal updating, changing color palettes and imagery for the type of seasonal cuisine you might expect from the California school of cooking.