PASTA FLYER
& CASELLA’S
Through the Museum of Food and Drink, we met many incredible culinary artists that were pushing the boundaries of taste and science in their work. Two such individuals were Mark Ladner and Cesare Casella, two of the most renowned chefs in New York City.
Mark had a science-based concept for creating high-quality pasta in a fraction of the time than traditionally needed – this was Pasta Flyer. Alongside partner Nastassia Lopez, the story they came to us with was that of an Italian grandmother (Nonna) that had been visited by aliens. So impressed with her traditional Italian cooking, the aliens combined their superior technology with her cuisine to create delicious pasta in a flash, and distribute it over the world.
Love the concept! To represent the old/new dichotomy, we found photographs from 1960s Italy that had a distinct personality, and then overlaid these with crisp graphics. A metallic flying saucer (or its shadow) was inserted into all of these scenes, and taglines referenced this presence.
Pasta Flyer was ultimately short-lived but beloved, and unfortunately I did not get quality images of the interior. But these were amazing quality pasta dishes you could get for 8 bucks, in less than a minute, and if you ever get the chance to eat Mark’s cooking, drop everything and do so.
CASELLA’S
Cesare Casella is an incredibly warm and generous individual. His remarkable cooking is a merging of two lifelong interests – the traditional Italian cooking of his youth, and ingredient-driven sustainable farming practice. Just as distinct as his cooking is his personal appearance – a warm manner, unique profile, and always with a hefty clutch of freshly-picked rosemary in his pocket.
His new venture was using old-world curing techniques on American heritage breed hogs to create a new and unique kind of prosciutto and other fine meats available in select markets. To give his namesake project a unique look and feel that blended the traditional and the new, we created a few things – a no-frills logotype, a cameo-style profile image, and a signature pattern for packaging. The signature pattern is an abstraction of meat marbling with his trademark rosemary sprigs mixed in.
My time working with Cesare concluded upon joining Complex so I was unable to see through the application of everything that was developed, but am happy to see the brand doing well, winning food and sustainability awards, and delivering on Cesare’s good name. Get your own here.
