Saint-Urbain’s Masani Pizza identity celebrates the family that owns it — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Lillian Pizzeria had been an institution in Forest Hills, Queens, since 1972, and Mike Chau grew up going there with his family for Friday night dinner. He later moved back to Forest Hills and kept going to Lillian with his own children. A New York food personality, Chau has spent more than a decade documenting the city’s restaurants and runs two Instagram accounts: his personal @mikejchau and @foodbabyny, which is about New York City and his children. In 2026, he and his wife, Alexandra, bought the restaurant and renamed it as Masani Pizza, combining the names of their three children, Matty, Sammy and Nicky.

To design the identity, Chau turned to creative agency Saint-Urbain and its Founder & Creative Director, Alex Ostroff, who met the couple soon after moving to New York in 2014 and has known their children almost since they were born. The brief asked for a classic New York neighbourhood slice shop that respected Lillian Pizzeria while improving the perception of the pizza, ingredients and experience. Saint-Urbain’s remit covered strategy, positioning, copywriting, custom lettering, illustration, packaging, merchandise and signage. “For me, this whole project was a gift to my friend and his family. I wanted to create something they could have forever,” Ostroff tells us.

Mike loves 90s hip-hop, sneakers, streetwear and New York street culture, and he wanted that side of him in the identity. Although he had named the restaurant after his children, he was a little hesitant to lean too heavily on the family, not wanting the identity to feel like an extension of Food Baby or too cute or corny. “I think we challenged him on that a little, because to us, that was the most special thing about the restaurant,” Ostroff explains. The three children are part of the restaurant – Nicky helps fold pizza boxes, Sammy draws on the chalkboard and Matty comes round with his friends. From that, Saint-Urbain wrote the tagline ‘Masani Pizza. A Family Business.’ “It’s not the most novel tagline in the world, but it’s good because it’s true,” he adds. “We weren’t trying to manufacture a brand story. The story was already there.”

For the visual direction, Saint-Urbain looked at historical pizza and fast-food identities, including the original Jack in the Box logo from the 70s, the old McPizza logo, Burger Chef and Pizza Hut, as well as posters from Forest Hills Stadium and old New York restaurant signage and commercial lettering. “We hate when brands just redo something from a long time ago,” Ostroff notes. “I think the way we avoided making it feel cliché was by making sure it felt as much like the family as possible.” Saint-Urbain’s type designer drew the Masani lettering from scratch, starting on paper, with flared, organic serif details that, in Ostroff’s words, “make the wordmark feel like a living thing, like a friendly restaurant.”

The agency paired the custom lettering with Pangram Pangram’s sans serif PP Neue York Normal, Typejockeys’ whimsical serif Firelli Bold and Heavyweight’s industrial-feeling HW Animo R350. “The main Masani wordmark is soft, warm and handmade, and these supporting fonts bring in that more contemporary, bold New York feeling,” Ostroff details. The colour came from Alexandra, who loved the idea of a dark red. “I think part of it was a reaction to the original restaurant, which she kept describing as very white, almost like a hospital,” he suggests. The palette uses a deeper burgundy rather than typical, bright pizzeria red.

Matty, Sammy and Nicky appear on the side of the restaurant’s building, a block from where they live, in portraits that Saint-Urbain’s illustrator drew by hand from photographs on Ostroff’s phone and from the Food Baby Instagram account. Saint-Urbain updated some of the haircuts, which Alexandra noticed were wrong. “We wanted them to love the illustrations, recognise themselves and be excited when they point at the sign and show their friends,” he explains. On the shopfront, Saint-Urbain identified the typeface behind the old sign’s lettering, which read Lillian Pizza, and adapted that lettering to spell Masani Pizza, adding the letters it needed and adjusting the kerning. “I love that you can walk past this place and recognise something from the old restaurant, even though it’s a new business.”

The identity extends across three pizza box designs, individual pie packaging inspired by the little dessert pie boxes that McDonald’s used to sell, and an MP monogram that the family uses everywhere. Of the three creative directions that Saint-Urbain explored, the first – the warmest and most family-oriented – became the identity. The second direction was bolder, drawing on streetwear, sneakers and hip-hop, and Ostroff calls it “probably the most Mike of them all.” Its logo, inspired by the old McPizza lettering, appears on a frozen pizza box planned for a 2027 launch. The third, more experimental direction has graphic details that include a pizza lizard, and its logo is on a bomber jacket. “I think that’s one of the things that’s really fun about having an independent family-owned restaurant,” he tells us. “You can keep a strong core identity while having the freedom to experiment with other creative elements.”

“There’s this expression in the restaurant industry – ‘friends and family.’ Restaurants have friends-and-family nights where they invite the people they care about most,” Ostroff concludes. “And that’s really what this project was. It was a friends-and-family project.”