NEW ORLEANS—“We didn’t want another 8.5” by 11,” Josh Harris tells the room. “So we made a decision to change menus every six months.”
And through that simple logistical challenge and a desire to forget boring, the legend of San Francisco’s Trick Dog began. When people throw around the term “creative” in reference to a bar, usually it refers to the cocktail menu. Make no mistake, Trick Dog dreams up some delightful drinks—but its design prowess has earned the team even more attention. And at the 2019 Tales of the Cocktail conference, they walked a crowd through seven years of lessons borne out of a need to routinely rethink the wheel (or the Pantone packet, or the calendar, or the vinyl 45s binder).
Morgan Schick, a designer and Harris’ hospitality partner, says the team took inspiration from classic designer Ray Loewy. Loewy became known as a grandfather of industrial design, wanting to create entire packages or environments that worked cohesively rather than focusing on a singular label or logo. One of his most famous works centered on the iconic Pennsylvania Railroad. “Every single piece related to every other—patterns in the drapes would cue lines on the locomotive,” Schick says.
“We took that idea to bars,” he continues. “How you interact with this paper [the menu] dictates your experience. It’s like if you say hello to an asshole—the rest of the conversation could be fine, but it’s sour with that first impression. Menus are a bar’s hello.”
Trick Dog’s work to date spans form factor and inspiration. Beyond its eye-catching Pantone debut, other notable menus included a tourist map of San Francisco (which followed established research on routes an eye takes while reading), a Chinese restaurant menu complete with Mandarin and images (a way to demystify drinks with unusual ingredients and drive sales), and a slew of political pins ahead of the 2016 election (Harris jokes they were never as ready to change menus as they were in November/December 2016).
Sometimes intentionally and other times not, this constant menu evolution has given the Trick Dog team several lessons it still employs. For instance, the Pantone menu proved to be good for ordering in a crowded bar—hold up the right swatch from a distance, the bartender can silently confirm an order—but bad for overall logistics (the perfect size to be stuck in a pocket and walked away with). The vinyl record books or CIA classified documents proved to be less steal-able but more unwieldy in size, clogging up bar traffic.
Perhaps these lessons best come together in more recent Trick Dog designs. Starting with a dog calendar of the bar’s favorite pets, Trick Dog has been raising the stakes on what can become a menu and collaborating with others they admire in the Bay Area to deliver. That one, for instance, had a price tag on the outside not just to subconsciously deter stealing, but to genuinely offer calendars for sale. Proceeds went to a local pet adoption facility, and the facility held an adoption event outside the bar near the calendar’s debut.
This approach came back again with a Children’s Book menu, a photo book of commissioned murals across town, and (Harris’ favorite) a Joy of Cocktails retro-styled cookbook in the second half of 2018. Harris and Schick essentially found an excuse to reach out to their favorite Bay Area chefs, interview them about their cuisines, collaborate on a cocktail, and then sketch out a recipe to make every component of that drink from scratch. Not only could customers then have fun recreating these drinks at the most granular level, but they got a peek at the sourcing and pricing that goes into a fancy cocktail you’d see at a bar like Trick Dog.
That menu (and others like it) sold well, allowing Trick Dog to continue doing more and more ambitious ideas knowing some production costs could be recouped and a good cause would win in the end (this time a local food pantry). “The cookbook was my mom’s favorite, too,” Schick adds. “She told me, ‘I finally see why your drinks are so damn expensive.”
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