“A restaurant should have a script, not a slogan.” — an idea we kept coming back to.
Every restaurant we love has its own gravity. Some pull with a colour, some with a bell, some with the way the chef looks up when you walk in. We wanted Xin’s pull to be a handful of sentences — the kind you overhear at the next table and carry home with you.
So we made XINDINGS — an alphabet of phrases we would not stop repeating. Not a font in the strict sense, though we set it in one. Closer to a lexicon: a small library of six or seven ideas cast in gold, that appear again and again on our tables, our menus, our postcards, our Reels.
Think of it the way a Zen garden thinks of a rock — placed once, held forever. Or the way a good bookshop reprints the same six sentences on every bookmark it ever gives away. XINDINGS are our bookmarks. When you see one on a wall, or a coaster, or in gold under a headline on this site, we’re quoting ourselves out loud so you know it’s us.
The tagline that opens the alphabet — Feed your genius — is the whole idea in three words. A meal is not just fuel. A meal, done well, in the right company, at a table where questions are welcome, is what the coffee-house philosophers of Vienna and Chennai and Kolkata used to call food for the mind. That is the genius we mean. Yours. Every time.
Every phrase in the XINDINGS lexicon is set in a custom OpenType face we commissioned for Xin. Two weights (fill & line) live inside the site’s CSS — you’ll see the fill on our headlines and the line on our smaller flourishes. Both were drawn to sit gently beside serif body copy, never to shout over it.
The Latin word colophon means “a finishing stroke.” The essay ends here — but XINDINGS keeps going. Every headline on this site is one. Every card on your table has one etched into it. Every Bowl Story reel opens with one.