Brand Identity For Lenlen Thai Restaurant
Michelin-level food, but the brand looks delightfully handmade.
Pentagram created a playful, tactile identity for LenLen, a contemporary Thai restaurant in Manhattan. Handmade lettering, bespoke illustrations, family-photo collage, murals, and signage evoke the spontaneous warmth of a lived-in Thai shophouse while supporting an elevated dining experience.
Insights
- LenLen’s whole identity is built around the shophouse concept: a Bangkok building type where business runs downstairs and family lives upstairs, echoing the restaurant’s own story of blurred boundaries between work, home, private, and public.
- The brand deliberately avoids a polished luxury look despite the Michelin Guide 2026 listing; Pentagram instead used a custom hand-drawn bubble typeface, slanted street-style lettering, bespoke Thai daily-life illustrations, and murals to keep the mood spontaneous and warm.
- Founder Wanisa Torboonsitikorn’s personal history is central: she grew up in a Thai-Chinese shophouse where her grandparents ran a tannery below and her mother cooked upstairs for neighbors, and the identity incorporates collaged family photos from her own archive.
- Pentagram paired handmade graphics with practical, everyday type choices like Manu and Arial, using Arial as a plain workhorse under the more expressive custom lettering.
- The experience is coordinated with the space itself: the 50-seat Flatiron restaurant includes a shoppable front room, retro TVs, birch plywood, tiled walls, mismatched vintage chairs, and a custom soundtrack of 1960s Thai psychedelic funk and jazz.
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