When Restaurant Ads Were Worth Framing

“The first ads we did for Florent were only advertised in Paper magazine. We wanted to be the cool restaurant, so we designed the ads with no address, no telephone number, no American Express cards,” Kalman once said in an interview. His thought was, “Okay, people can't find it. We're going to make it more complicated!” Morellet said. Later, they added ads with addresses with cheeky takes on directions that tapped into Morellet’s obsession with maps. Each month was fresh: “It was always conceptual…they were always surprising and amazing and weird and funny,” former Paper editor-in-chief and co-founder Kim Hastreiter told Caper. 

In later years, the ads increasingly took on a political bent (Morellet, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, was known to put updates of his T-cell count on the menu board), and the restaurant would spearhead shuttling buses to Washington, D.C. for protests. “From the minute it opened, Florent was a hit, which allowed them to sort of kind of get away with stuff that probably no one would have gotten away with if you actually really needed to use advertising to drum up business,” said Douglas Riccardi, who worked as a designer at M&Co. (One Florent ad that Riccardi’s subsequent design firm Memo made poked fun at Mayor Giuliani's crackdown on Times Square peep shows.)

Lately, I've been having fun looking at New York restaurant ads that ran in magazines like Paper, New York, Details, The Village Voice, Interview, and Spy. Decades ago, in the heyday of magazines, they were an effective marketing and branding tool. More than promotional materials, the ads were the kind of out-of-the-box designs a creative director today would covet for their moodboard. Looking back, they function as dining time capsules that not only chart the rise and fall of print itself, but the symbiotic relationship between restaurants and Downtown’s creative community.