In pink and cyan, beveled typography, a slight feeling of “crime and coconut”: the fast-food chain from the Parisian region, Tasty Crousty, has built all its visual communication on the aesthetic of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
Behind the graphic borrowing lies a promise: that of belonging, of an outlaw identity sold at nine euros per chicken/rice tray.
Each restaurant opening is organized like a video game mission, where hundreds of young people occupy a territory – revealing that the image carries more than what it’s asked to transport.
There is something immediately readable in the graphic design of Tasty Crousty restaurants: pink and cyan fields, downward beveled typography, a slight feeling of “crime and coconut.” Everything speaks to us, and we are less facing a visual identity guide than a confession. A Parisian fast-food chain has chosen Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a video game restricted to those over eighteen, as its aesthetic emblem. The city of Miami (eternally frozen in 1986) is then reconstructed pixel by pixel. The brand, like the fantasized Miami, will beat. And beat hard! Bourgeois entrenched in your certainties, you better clear out quickly! Because, clearly, you are not ready for what is coming.
Miami Vice screenshot
Vice City, or the Miami fantasy
Understanding Tasty Crousty requires first looking at what Vice City is. Released in 2002 and published by Rockstar Games, the game immerses the player in a cardboard and neon Miami. The streets are saturated with cocaine, and the 1980s “made in” soundtrack smells of sunburn and blood coagulating around parking lots. The immediately recognizable aesthetic offers palm tree silhouettes on a background of pink gradients and characters drawn in a semi-realistic style reminiscent of pulp fiction book covers (B-movie to Z). The main font of the game – Pricedown, designed by Typodermic Fonts – has become one of the most identifiable styles in popular culture over the years. Rockstar understood (before everyone else) that typography was a decorative element as important as architecture, imposing a new mental geography on us. Because Vice City is not Miami – it is the Miami dream of a generation raised on Miami Vice episodes and Brian De Palma’s cocaine films. An America made of stucco and chrome, where social ascent passes only through crime, and moral rules still apply only to those who cannot afford to break them. The game intended to be a satire, but alas, its aesthetic was too appealing to remain sarcastic for long. The Tasty Crousty teams understood this well and decided to adopt this mafia universe with multiple references for themselves.
It’s insane to see how the fast-food chain founded in Épinay-sur-Seine built its entire visual communication by borrowing codes from the fictional Vice City. The almost literal transplantation becomes astounding. The logo, flyers, decor, everything, absolutely everything, evokes a tropical mafia. The brand shamelessly appropriates a memory created by popular culture and, more than just selling a nine-euro chicken/rice tray, offers its “public” a sense of belonging.
