Opening: Starfruit

The latest yogurt craze-inspired entrant to the Chicago restaurant scene is Starfruit, opening tomorrow in Ukrainian Village. Unlike competitors Berry Chill and Wow Bao (you knew they were serving Asian-style frozen yogurt, right?), Starfruit makes its parfaits, smoothies and frozen concoctions from kefir, a variant of yogurt with a high concentration of bacteria. But good bacteria! Starfruit uses “probiotic” a lot on its trippy, hypnotic website (the best Flash-driven restaurant website we’ve ever seen, by the way, even though we normally don’t like Flash), a totally hot trend in 2008. The yogurt…it will cure all your medical problems! It will do your taxes!

On that topic, as a special promotion for their opening day tomorrow, Starfruit is offering, for free, small parfaits, smoothies and frozens (let’s just call them that) plus one topping. All of this would normally be $5, so it’s not a bad deal. Flavors include flavors-of-the-week like Pomegranate and Acai, plus all the standard berries, a handful of fruits, and vanilla and capppuccino. Some of the flavors are available in organic, an extra 50 cents. The toppings are more fun, ranging from fresh fruit to milk and honey granola, yogurt chips (in case you can never get enough) and most exotically, mochi balls (a buck for the first topping, and then 50 cents per).

We say, the more, the merrier on yogurt. But the best part is, the menu they sent us came in three versions with three different fonts. They’ve since determined one for the website, but the tri-font menu gave us the unique opportunity to share with you the design decision as it came together. Here are the three options:

1)

2)

3)

The first one has a Harry Potter-type thing going on, the second one is like playful late 1950s, and the third one is a bit American Girl Place, yeah?

So which one makes us think the most about groovy yogurt? Also, why not just use the same sans serif font that the Starfruit logo is in? Because sans serif is modern and forward thinking, but Starfruit’s hippy-wellness-holistic angle requires a few serifs to put us in a time and place, and the curlycues in the first font are as close as you’re gonna get. And so, that’s the font they ultimately chose for the website. Branding, we think, is like one of those good bacteria! Best eaten fresh and cold.

Starfruit [MenuPages]
Starfruit [Official Site]

Opening: Starfruit