Tawla is a contemporary Eastern Mediterranean restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District. Relying on fresh and seasonal ingredients available in Northern California, Tawla’s cuisine re-interprets traditional Eastern Mediterranean recipes unfamiliar in the US.
Promising its clientele an informal dining experience in a lively atmosphere imbued with traditional Mediterranean hospitality, Tawla weaves together the culinary connections of Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, the Levant, Iran, and Egypt without losing the diverse colors of each thread.
As such, the assignment was to create a logo for a brand that places Northern California at the culinary epicenter of the cosmopolitan Eastern Mediterranean coastal cities. It should be timeless, ownable, and recognizable while reflecting the variety of cuisines instead of focusing on just one. More specifically, the assignment dictated that the brand and experience should also be a reflectionion of San Francisco itself.

For the design process, we went back to the meaning of the word “Tawla”. Tawla is Arabic for ‘Backgammon’. Like the concept’s cuisine, backgammon is shared among the whole East of the Mediterranean region, going by ‘Tavli’ in Turkey, and ‘Tavla’ in Greece, and ‘Tabula’ in Byzantine Greek. This exact naming clearly reflects how widely shared this game is in the region. More interestingly, Tawla also means table which brings it back to the unique culinary concept that it offers.
As such, we used the patterns and shapes seen on the backgammon board and reconstructed the letterforms of the word.
Vis a vis competition in SF, there are many examples of restaurants that reflect a single country from the east of the Mediterranean from Greek, to Turkish, to Lebanese. But there are no SF examples of restaurants focused on the shared cuisine of the region. We made sure the logo reflects all the coastal Mediterranean cities together and not just one so that we stand out from the competition.
The restaurant and the brand also aimed to reset people’s understanding of the region’s cuisine as delicate, refined, and sophisticated so we made sure to integrate the upscale Cosmopolitan feel of San Francisco to it.

The logo is a balanced mix of cultured and modern, ornate and industrial, pretty and edgy. It’s a modern take on a culture and region that has deep historic roots.
Tawla and its cuisine have already been featured as a “Must Try” so far in prestigious publications such as modernluxury.com, sfstation.com, and sfweekly.com among others.