Eating your pasta in Melbourne’s St.Kilda also comes with distinctly typographic flavours.

Alphagetti | In 1990 I was waiting for a tram on the Esplanade in St.Kilda, a seaside suburb of Melbourne, when I cared to glance at a spaghetti bar across the road. I saw the happy patrons eating away, bibs tightly tucked into their shirtnecks and all lined up along a window. But it was the window, or rather the brick wall supporting it that then caught my attention. I noticed that the brick wall was in fact an E. In excitement my eyes rushed across the rest of the dark facade to realise that the entire spaghetti restaurant was in fact made up of typography spelling out its name: Leo’s. In a short telephone interview with the owners of Leo’s, they expressed how bemused they were that tourists now come and look at this architectural oddity. They went on to explain that the site once had three very narrow shopfronts and that these were demolished in 1970/71 to form the present single-fronted façade. At a rough guess (because nobody can remember exactly) they estimated that the first shop would have been where the letter L is, the second the E and the third the O. This then becomes an interesting reference to the building’s history. It’s possible that one day the ever-aspirational St.Kilda will claim the Leo’s typographic façade as being their own version of the Hollywood Hills signage. Perhaps the greatest delight comes from knowing that everyday many restaurant patrons are chomping away on their pasta not realising that they are also having an alphabetical experience.

This article is a paraphrase of a text from Qwerty Issue 5 (1995) written and designed by Stephen Banham.