My Secret Arsenal of Fonts

There’s a new-ish restaurant in town that’s quickly become my favorite spot for special occasions, called Queen’s Raw Bar and Grill. Their brilliant billboard caught my eye first. A crab smoking a cigarette while holding a martini?! Get out of town... no... actually, please stay in town.

I went last night to celebrate a dear friend’s triumphant return home after a music tour, and I went for my birthday back in the Spring. The space feels like your favorite aunt’s warmly lit home in New Orleans, where she pulls out her good dishes, lights some candlesticks for ambiance, or just in case the power goes out with a moody storm rolling in, with a rotating cast of interesting characters, artists, and art from her travels on the wall. I love it. Beyond that, the branding is stunning and I haven’t been able to get the typefaces on their menu out of my brain since I first saw it in May and used my husband’s phone to take a million pictures of it while I went “phoneless” for the evening.

Exhibit A: Cool Cropping

Exhibit B: Cool Cropping Part 2.

By the looks of the timestamp on these images, the folder I created for them, and the last time I’ve opened these images, it’s been a total of 5 times. That’s more than once a month since I laid eyes upon this perfectly imperfect header font and its sans-serif sub-headline. Once you notice this type trend, you’ll start to see it everywhere. Like here, just today!

So I went digging for the origins of these typefaces because I want my whole life to look like them. I tried the trusty site What the Font, then What Font Is, and then Adobe’s Retype Tool and came up completely stumped. In the end, I discovered that I think the brilliant designer of Last Word Hospitality, Alyssa Zack, had her creative hand in this, and that perhaps it might be a custom typeface after all, as after I did a CSS inspection of their website 🕵️, the typeface is called “Crabby,” and that’s just too good to not be a custom typeface for an oyster bar.

My New Secret Arsenal of Fonts