Bremner Boulevard is a neighbourhood built for volume, not atmosphere—concrete plazas, corporate signage, and sports bars that exist to serve crowds moving in and out of games. When Mercatto Restaurants approached us about their third Toronto location, they wanted something different from the polished, wine-forward dining experience of Trattoria Mercatto at the Eaton Centre. Taverna would be darker, more casual, and built around a serious beer program. The goal was to create a genuine destination in a neighbourhood full of pit stops.

We started with the name. Taverna is an Italian word for a place of gathering, and it carried a warmth and weight the other properties didn’t. From there, we built a visual identity rooted in old-world mysticism: vintage Italian tarot cards, illuminated manuscripts, and astrological drawings, treated as a contemporary collage. 
It was rich, layered, and entirely unlike anything else on the block.

The floor-to-ceiling windows on Bremner were both an asset and a challenge. We designed large-scale layered vinyl graphics to wrap the facade, creating warmth and atmosphere inside while offering passersby just enough of a glimpse to draw them in. At the entrance, a custom hand-carved hanging sign on a vintage lamp-post announced the space with the kind of analogue confidence the rest of the street couldn’t match. The same sensibility carried into every touchpoint: menus, business cards, gift cards, and custom aprons and suspenders that made the front-of-house staff part of the world we’d built.