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Salva Bar is the restaurant chef Fabricio Chagas built to put his own Bahia in Rio de Janeiro – a personal, lived version of the northeastern Brazilian state – drawn from memory, family and the places that shaped him. For its identity, Chagas turned to local design studio Biabum, with a brief to capture that affection and everyday feeling without tipping into caricature.
Biabum organised the system around three things pulled from Bahia itself – the sea, with its lightness, sun and air; the sertão, standing for strength, family, land and affection; and the mangrove, a space of rhythm, gathering and greenery. Rather than sit only as colour palettes, they flow through the whole identity, each with its own library of illustrations and graphic references, and each carried into the building, where the ground floor takes the sea, the sertão shapes the family floor above, and the mangrove sets the top floor aside for music. “During the research phase, there were two visual references that came up repeatedly, but we consciously chose not to lean on them too heavily because they are already so strongly associated with representing Bahia and Brazil,” Creative Director Beatriz Tati Nóbrega explains. The studio took texture from xilogravura (woodcut printmaking); from the Fita do Bonfim, a ribbon and cultural symbol in Bahia, it took vibrant, luminous colours.
“The logotype was inspired by the hand-painted titles on a beautiful special edition of Jorge Amado’s books,” Nóbrega tells us of the writer whose special-edition covers carry hand-painted lettering on red. In Brazil, she notes, vernacular lettering “is almost part of our intangible cultural heritage,” so the work sat in preserving its warmth while refining it into a consistent, functional logotype. “We carefully adjusted proportions, spacing and rhythm so the final mark would feel human, while still performing across every application.”
Headlines are set in YWFT HLLVTKA, a handcrafted display face used exclusively in uppercase for graphic impact, its alternate glyphs echoing the irregularities of hand-painted signage. Body copy uses Universal Thirst’s Abacaxi Latin VF, a clean sans with a wide weight range, whose name is the Portuguese word for pineapple – a fruit, as Nóbrega points out, that carries strong cultural significance in Bahia, one of Brazil’s largest pineapple-producing regions, “a meaningful coincidence that reinforced our choice.”
The symbol is a contemporary reinterpretation of the carranca – the fierce, big-eyed figures once fixed to boats on the São Francisco River to protect the crew, now kept at the doorways of homes as talismans of welcome and good fortune. Both the river connection and the figure’s meaning to the chef drew Biabum to it. “Rather than reproducing it literally, we reinterpreted its form into a simplified mark that carries the same symbolic meaning,” Nóbrega explains, the mark being one of the first things a visitor meets on entering. It travels independently across coasters, staff t-shirts and touchpoints throughout the restaurant.
The chef’s personal life shows up through the use of family photographs. “We wanted them to feel like part of the visual system rather than looking like pages from a family album or a scrapbook,” Nóbrega recalls. The answer was a vivid colour treatment that turns the images into graphic elements, keeping their emotional value but stopping them from feeling like a documentary. The studio wrote up image guidelines that now extend past the archive to new photography across the brand, including portraits of the DJs who play the mangrove floor.
The identity refuses to smooth Chagas into a generic idea of Bahia. “I’m an authorial chef, and I created my Bahia in Rio,” he explains. “I did my best to bring a little piece of our beloved homeland to those who come to visit Rio de Janeiro.”