Mit Burgărie had a good idea, hiding in plain sight.
A set of characters, inspired by Romanian myths and fairy tales. Used on a menu here, a poster there. Never quite adding up to a brand.
How do you turn a good idea, scattered across posters and menus, into a world people want to step into?
We took the myth and made it the system. Every visual, every product, every corner of the space — part of the same story.
Defining the system
To bring clarity and direction, the brand was defined through a series of key questions.
What was the problem?
The brand lacked consistency and a clear direction, with an existing idea of characters that was never developed into a cohesive system.
Who is this for?
People nearby, hungry for something more than a quick meal.
What makes it different?
A world built from Romanian mythology — not just a name on a sign, but a story you can taste.
What is the personality?
Playful and bold, but rooted in something real — Romanian folklore, not a cartoon version of it.
What matters the most?
Every detail earning its place in the story, so nothing feels decorative or left to chance.
What are we building?
A unified brand system where every visual and verbal element reinforces the same story, from the logo to the last sticker on the wall.
The mark.
The old logo said "burger." Friendly, generic, and forgotten the moment you looked away.
The new one carries the myth instead. "Mit" — Romanian for myth — already meant something before we touched the mark. The word itself was rooted in legend and storytelling, but the logo wasn't saying it. It needed to become a character, not just a name.
We built it around a figure, not a specific hero from a specific tale, but the shape of one: long hair inspired by Romanian folklore, a back-facing silhouette as if caught mid-story, a weapon reimagined as a burger skewer. Every detail was chosen to feel both familiar and invented, the way folk heroes are — retold so many times that no one remembers the original, only the shape that remains.
The burger itself is subtly integrated into the form, present but never literal, so the mark reads first as a character, and only second as food. That order matters: it's the difference between a logo that sells a product and one that opens a story.
The menu, rewritten as a book.
A menu is usually a list. This one opens like a storybook — a drop cap beginning every chapter, the way old fairy tale collections did.
It opens with a story, not a greeting. By the time you reach the food, you've already stepped into the world: Făt-Frumos gathering his friends for a feast, the myth explaining why the restaurant exists at all.
Even the burgers carry names from the same world — Prâslea, Greuceanu, Harap Alb, Zâna Roșie — so ordering food means picking a character, not just a dish.
The house rules, the payment info, even the receipt — every practical page still speaks in the same voice. Nothing breaks character, all the way to the last page, where the story closes the way it opened: with the heroes still at the table, the bill paid, and one more tale added to the legend.
A hand-drawn alphabet.
The drop caps that open every chapter of the menu aren't a typeface. They're twenty-six small illustrations, each one built the same way old storybooks were — by hand, with a character hiding inside every letter.
Every character had to belong here. No exotic animals — only creatures native to Romania, or ones that already live inside its folklore. A becomes a hedgehog (arici, in Romanian). B becomes a stork (barză), and so on, all the way to Z. Each one starts as a rough sketch, worked out inside the shape of the letter until the animal and the form become the same thing, then rebuilt clean for print.
The result isn't decoration. It's a small piece of Romanian folklore, repeated twenty-six times — and it doesn't stay inside the menu. The same letters carry through packaging, stickers, walls, social media, every visual the brand puts out, so the story never really closes its cover.
Next Project
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