Brand: Lair
Scope: Menu, print, strategy
Year: 2022
Location: New Delhi, DL
The Cocktails Menu Edition II was (literally) a journey across India. How do you represent a country like India cohesively on a piece of menu that's so diverse, you can't even stick to a single aesthetic? The answer that we settled on, contradicted the very need to ask that question in the first place.
The Lair Cocktail Menu Edition II in use at the bar
Lair is a speakeasy bar in New Delhi's Basant Lok that is regularly ranked among the 5 best bars of the country. This project was an honour.
Lair as a bar has the personality of a mysterious, sexy French man smoking in a cafe on a rainy evening in 60s Paris. Their Cocktail Menu Edition I served this aesthetic perfectly well and I didn't think Edition II could top that. I still don't think it did, but some very kind people have tried to convince me otherwise.
Customers at Lair don't just order from the menu, they take the time to read and know the story behind it.
The first edition was a beautifully designed minimal menu that featured some of Lair's signature cocktails along with the classics. Of course, the drinks received love from the patrons and a year later, it was time to revisit the menu and its offerings.
The bartenders at Lair carefully researched the drinking culture and habits of four major regions across India - the Himalayan mountains, the Indo Gangetic plains, the Central Highlands and the Coast. Each region had its own special ingredients which were used to craft new concoctions to one up the already phenomenal tastes from Edition I.
The Central Highlands
The Indo Gangetic Plains
The Himalayan Mountains
The Coasts
We came up with a concept of a menu with storytelling at its heart. Each region would have a dedicated section of its own, and the centre fold that listed the drink would open up further and reveal a custom drawn map of the region inside it, with an introduction to the regions ecology and culture on the left and a brief description of each region-specific ingredient on the right (see the videos for a better understanding of the format).
Truly, it is difficult to put into words the grandiose of this menu without physically having it in your hands. The texture, the embossing, the gold foiling, the material, everything is a design element in this menu.
The following are select pages from the menu, notice the details in the maps and their relevance to the region they represent.
Map of The Coasts
Drinks from The Coasts
Map of the Indo Gangetic Plains
Drinks from the Indo Gangetic Plains
Map of the Central Highlands
Drinks from the Central Highlands
Map of the Great Mountains
Drinks from the Great Mountains
The 'legacy' section at the end of the Cocktails Menu Edition II with a few drinks from Edition I
Designing the menu was just the first half of the project. Now we had to market it. If you follow Lair on Instagram, you'd fall in love with their language- the kind of images they use, the music they play, the captions they write, it's all a conscious choice to maintain that 'aura'.
We leveraged the 'mysterious aura' aesthetic to create a series of videos and posts that were posted (now archived) on Lair's Instagram to let the patrons know that the already much-loved Edition I was about to be one-up'd.
Video teaser for the Cocktails Menu Edition II
Teaser video giving a sneak peek into the Edition II
