Alan Dague-Greene and Mark van Bronkhorst dug Sirenne out of a rare eighteenth-century book published by Louis Renard, and its ornamental capitals still carry more history in one initial than most menus carry on a whole page. Twenty-three cuts, four optical sizes, roman, italic, and a properly extravagant swash italic, mean the same elegance scales from a tasting-menu cover down to the smallest footnote on the wine list, no matter how humble the vintage. Set the specials in the swash italic and even the Tuesday risotto sounds like an occasion.

Cyrus Highsmith named Quiosco after the Spanish word for kiosk, then made sure it could work a shift just as demanding as any street vendor’s. Drawing on W. A. Dwiggins’ ideas about the tension between a letter's inside and outside, Highsmith packed in a lively texture that holds up in the narrowest column, so a two-page menu can list every appetizer, entree, and side without the type feeling cramped or the reader feeling rushed. Semibold and bold weights carry the section heads, and the companion Quiosco Display steps in when a dish has earned its own line. Small footprint, big appetite.

Pellegrino Artusi was a celebrated Italian food writer who is credited with the creation of one of the most influential cookbooks in the history of Italian cuisine. Taking inspiration from his legacy, Francesco Canovaro decided to work on a typographic homage to the delicacy and finesse of Italian traditional cuisine.

Laura Meseguer built Brushland on commission for Interbrand, tasked with giving the Spanish winery Azpilicueta a signature worth toasting to. She wrote every letter with a Pentel pocket brush pen, and the digitized version keeps the illusion alive with four alternating glyphs per character, so a name never repeats a letterform the same way twice, no matter how many bottles it ends up on. It is built for branding and packaging rather than body copy, the kind of face that makes a takeout box or a farm-stand sign look hand-painted that very morning.

Patrick Griffin found Vintage Deco on the side of a building: a vintage hotel sign at Spring Street and Fifth Avenue in Seattle that stopped him mid-stride, and mid-lunch-run, at a type conference. He redrew its wide, breezy caps with the sharp cuts of Bank Gothic and Microgramma, landing somewhere between art deco and late-1950s futurism. Five weights make it as comfortable holding down a diner's window lettering as anchoring a fine-dining wordmark, proof that a hungry glance upward is still one of the better research methods in type design.