What a Hotel Restaurant’s Brand Guidelines Should Actually Contain

Most hotel restaurant brand guidelines are a logo, two colours and a font list. That is a style sheet, and it will not stop the restaurant drifting back into looking like the hotel’s breakfast room within a year. A proper guidelines document is the operating manual for the brand, and it should answer three questions in order: who are we, how do we look, and where does it all show up.

This is the structure we used for Gemma’s Cucina Italiana, an Italian restaurant in Nairobi’s Westlands for Accor and Novotel, and the one to ask for if you are commissioning a restaurant identity inside a hotel. It builds on the idea that a hotel restaurant has to feel independent from the hotel, because the guidelines are where that independence gets written down and protected.

1. Brand and culture

This section comes first because everything after it is a consequence. It covers the brand concept and story, the audience, the positioning and what sets the restaurant apart from the competition down the road, then the essence, vision and mission, the personality, and the tone of voice.

Two parts are most often skipped and most often missed. The first is signature elements, the handful of experience drivers that make the place feel like itself. The second is tone of voice, which keeps menus, booking emails and Instagram captions sounding like one venue instead of five freelancers. For Gemma’s, the concept is a character rather than a cuisine: Gemma, a painter who found her calling in a kitchen in Livorno. Every later decision, from the illustration to the way a menu reads, can be tested against her.

2. Brand identity

Here sit the logo and its colour versions, the brand palette, typography, graphic devices and illustration. It is the part everyone expects, and the part where the detail decides whether the identity holds up.

A restaurant logo has to work embossed on a menu, tiny on a coaster and lit on an awning, so the guidelines should show it in all three. Palette and type need real rules, not just swatches. Gemma’s has four colours and no more: oxblood, cream, sky blue and sage, with the sky blue only ever appearing as sky. That single rule is what keeps the illustration reading as a window instead of a picture pasted onto a layout, and it is the kind of rule a new designer can follow without guessing.

3. Applications

This is where guidelines earn their fee. Show the identity working on the real items the restaurant will produce: business cards, menus, signage, gift cards and vouchers, coasters, tent cards, and digital and social materials. For a hotel venue, add the awkward ones, such as room-service cards and key-card sleeves.

Menus and signage need the most care. Menus change weekly, so give the team templates they can edit without breaking the look. Signage is the longest-lived and least forgiving item, so it needs exact sizes, materials and placement, especially where it sits near the hotel’s own wayfinding. At Gemma’s the engraved vignettes are printed one to a coaster, so a table setting becomes a small collection. Small applications like that are what people photograph and remember.

What to ask for

When you brief an agency, ask to see a sample contents page before you sign. If it stops at the logo and colours, you are buying a style sheet. If it covers culture, identity and applications, with page numbers and real examples, you are buying something the restaurant team can run from on day one and the hotel cannot quietly overrule. We took O Macanese through the same process for another hotel restaurant.

If you are planning a restaurant inside a hotel and want guidelines that do this job, get in touch and we will talk it through.