Since its founding in New York nearly a decade ago, Studio Appétit has positioned itself at the forefront of F&B innovation. The multidisciplinary creative design studio, now headquartered in the Hague, the Netherlands, collaborates with global brands, including IKEA, Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, on pioneering projects that both challenge and inspire.
“It’s vital to deliver experiences that guests cannot create for themselves,” says the studio’s founder and creative director Ido Garini, who trained as a product designer in Tel Aviv before pivoting to the culinary world. “That’s always been true, but for the hospitality industry, it perhaps has never been more essential.” From a monolithic, nearly 20-foot-tall installation at London’s all-day café German Gymnasium—part of a project with London studio Conran + Partners that explored the boundaries between food and faith—to his partnership with Rosewood London to develop the concept, menu, and presentation for its art-centric afternoon tea, they were “an opportunity to take big ideas and distill them into something that works in a high-volume environment,” he says.
The Rosewood project proved formative for Garini, who has over the years tapered his more extravagant creative urges and developed a fierce appreciation for commerciality. “I realized that it doesn’t matter how successful our projects are conceptually,” he explains, “if they don’t justify themselves in the real world.”
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His current endeavor, creative direction for a cocktail bar in Vienna, is yet another opportunity to demonstrate balance. Within the storied Hotel Beethoven Wien, LVDWIG transports visitors with a complex Garini-devised drinks menu that’s heavy on narrative. The Destinations series, for example, presents guests with a passport to chart their progress around the world as they imbibe concoctions inspired by vacation spots—all set to a specially curated soundtrack.
“As we enter a post-COVID world, it’s time to think about how brands can deliver in new and different ways,” he says. “It’s become my mission to push the needle incrementally and to make small changes that drive the industry in a more creative direction.”
This article originally appeared in HD’s September 2020 issue.
