Give the Monkey Sugar. Or a Slice of Nutella and Banana Pizza?

high-quality ingredients are combined in unusual ways; pizzas are long instead of round, they are cut with scissors and shared amongst friends; the pizzeria becomes a cocktail bar. The design concept makes use of trusted recollections from our collective memory and combines traditional and modern elements to create a surprising story with a tantalising twist. The target audience is one that loves Italian food and the Italian lifestyle as much as it relishes new culinary delights and great cocktails.

The conjunction of traditional, familiar and modern elements runs throughout the material and colour concept. A ceiling of wooden lamellae fans out from the entrance area above the entire space. Chains of festoon lighting distributed across the ceiling and a rough tiled floor underfoot come together to evoke memories of balmy summer nights in Italy, spent drinking wine under the stars. The ceiling lines reappear in a graphic leading to the stainless steel pizza oven, which concentrates your gaze upon the mouth of the oven. Pizza ingredients are presented on a wood veneer counter, as White Monkey stands for top quality and exceptional freshness of all its products. This is where pizza is reinvented, using unusual recipes and fresh ingredients from all around the world.

The colour concept uses warm pink, red and earthy tones to radiate retro charm, thus creating a link to traditional Italian culture. Wall-filling collages pick up the past through nostalgic motifs from 1950s Italy, before transposing them into a modern, urban context through oversize flower motifs and colourfully abstract forms. The same applies to the large billboard – a nod to the simpler advertising media of times past – which conveys White Monkey philosophy through tongue-in-cheek slogans. It is also an integral part of the lighting concept, which generates the right atmosphere at all times of day through a targeted use of different lighting sources: from an illuminated monkey and various pendant luminaires to strings of lights.