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		Jinbei Restaurant Menu
	Publication Design	A jinbei is a kind of traditional Japanese clothing worn by men and boys during the summer consisting of a top and matching shorts. It was also the name of one of New York City's original and most innovative Sushi restaurants.

Located in the basement of a brownstone in far East Midtown, Ike Koike, master sushi chef and owner, built a reputation for amazingly fresh and generous makizushi or rolls, yellowtail and scallion maki, and chirashizushi, scattered sushi served in a bowl over sushi-meshi rice. We were commissioned by Jinbei soon after returning from Japan on the Sankyo Postmodern Kyoto program to create a menu that presented the chef's creations in a new and compelling manner. Our solution was inspired by the Japanese tradition of Gyotaku, the ancient Japanese folk art of painting fish and making an impression on paper as well as the New York modernist tradition of clean, spare typography and design. We integrated the two traditions with fish "caught" throughout various Japanese magazines with a spacey montage of Japanese imagery and simple yet edgy typography. The menus were printed with the split fountain technique in offset lithography in which multiple ink colors are placed on a single roller. The variable mixing of the inks during printing ensures that no two menus are exactly alike.