Intro

Little RAKI is a subsidiary brand restaurant of an independent Japanese creative cuisine brand; the owner has worked at Bund 18 Bar rouge, and has studied in France before establishing this Japanese-style creative cuisine restaurant.

The first flagship store of the “RAKI” restaurant brand was a large restaurant of 400m2, and this store is a second brand concept restaurant located in a shopping center dining theme area. We have analyzed whether to continue to use the model and style of the first store from the perspective of its brand model, and decided after conducting a market survey and brand and taking the brand’s creative concept into consideration to add “Little” to the name in order to express a new concept brand.

The Little RAKI brand is full of fashionable cuisine culture, and the “RAKI is Lucky” slogan is backed by “lucky” good food. Little RAKI prepares fresh, in-season food stuffs using exquisite Japanese-style and French-style cooking methods, and employs plate decoration to achieve sublimely delicious, authentic flavors that overturn customers’ stereotyped impressions of traditional cuisine. Little RAKI combines varying elements with traditional flavors, and uses various cooking methods to attain unforgettably wonderful dishes.

In the beginning, the restaurant’s spatial design was not necessarily inspired by its type of cuisine. Because what creative cuisine emphasizes is creativity, and what cooking methods emphasize are warmth and fullness when food enters a diner’s mouth, we decided that the space should have a low-key role, and increased the space’s textures in order to enhance its brand appeal. We wanted to make mid-/high-end gastronomic culture into a symbol of the fashionable life, and enhance customers’dining experience through the senses of hearing, vision, smell, taste, and touch.

While most people associate Japanese cuisine with a strong Japanese-style sense of Zen and mountainous landscape paintings, our modern, intriguing, highly design-centric approach overturns past stereotypes, and conveys the core psychology of the brand’s creative cuisine. The central area consists of a bright, open bar, which is the restaurant’s main visual attraction. We deliberately used a mosaic material with an uneven, 3-D texture to express the feel of the stones in a Japanese garden, and the half-open periphery of the restaurant employs aluminum panels with three types of perforation densities and shapes. This gives the visual impression of distant mountains and sky, and passers-by can indirectly catch glimpses of the interior space through the holes in the panel. The outline of the overlapping mountain ranges and lamplight of the ridgelines express determination and rationality, and are complemented by a metallic screen that conveys the feeling of a misty landscape, while creating an overall impression contrasting the roughness of nature with the refinement of culture. The wall behind the booth area is the visual center of the brand as a whole, and is made from square aluminum tubes in a lattice pattern, which expresses overlapping mountains. The relationship between the color tones and lighting, and the mountain-shaped screen around the perimeter, conveys a low-key ambiance, and a bright brand logo is embedded in a mountain peak, symbolizing the superlative brand spirit. We have deliberately used sofas and other furniture with ocean-themed colors, and the blue combines with the warmer colors to add variety to the space, while letting customers feel a connection between the different areas.