Big Queer Food Fest
A Seat At The Table
Logo and identity development plus the full materials system for the first food festival built around the queer culinary community.
- Boston debut sold out
- Grew from pop-ups to a weeklong festival
- James Beard Foundation partnership
The challenge
Queer chefs shaped American food — James Beard included — and almost none of that history was told out loud. Founders David Lewis and Chad Hahne had the idea and the chefs, but no brand: nothing that could hold a pop-up dinner in West Hollywood, a sold-out food hall in Boston, a James Beard Foundation partnership and a national press cycle under one mark.
What we did
We built the identity from the ground up. The logo fuses a flame and a fork with striped bands drawn from Pride, trans and Progress flags, so the mark reads as food first and community immediately after. From there we developed the materials system that carried the festival on the road: event and dinner collateral, chef and tastemaker announcements, ticketing and signage, social templates, and the site framing that answered the question the brand exists to answer — why a queer food festival. One mark, one voice, scalable from a single chef dinner to a weeklong city takeover.
The consequence
Launched in 2023 as the BQFF On The Road dinner series, the brand carried stops from West Hollywood to Guerneville to Boston, where the April 2024 debut at High Street Place sold out. The festival went on to partner with the James Beard Foundation on Pride Month programming and graduated to a first weeklong festival in Boston, April 28 to May 4, 2025, co-sponsored by Meet Boston with GLAAD, Community Servings and BAGLY. Coverage ran in Eater, The Boston Globe, WBUR, Out Traveler and Boston Spirit, with a chef roster including Tiffani Faison, Karen Akunowicz, Rashida Holmes, Rick Martinez and Andy Baraghani.
The work itself.
Scored on the
consequential triangle.
- Talkability
- A flame-and-fork mark in flag stripes is recognized before it is read — and photographed everywhere it appears.
- Defensibility
- No other food festival can claim this community's culinary history, so no competitor can borrow the position.
- Indispensability
- A brand system that scales from one chef dinner to a city-wide week becomes the platform the whole movement runs on.
Your turn.
We take a small number of engagements at a time. Tell us what's at stake.