For Familierestaurant Pluis we built the brand, the mascot, a three-language site with its own web game, and the systems behind the newsletter.
restaurantpluis.nl ↗Pluis is a restaurant for families in Aarle-Rixtel, the Netherlands, open since January 2026. Pancakes, lunch, dinner, and plenty of room for children. We did the brand, the mascot, the website, a web game, and the systems behind the newsletter.
The brand
A restaurant for families has to be warm without turning childish. The brand is built on a wordmark with round, heavy letters and a palette of seven colours, from golden pancake to caramel syrup. Everything sits in a 46-page brand book: logo, colour, typography, tone and applications.
The mascot
Pluis the pancake mouse. A mouse with a body of stacked pancakes, a chef's hat and a whisk for a tail. We drew him in pencil first, then worked him out in a set of poses: waving, cooking, tucking in.
Pluis wears a different hat for each occasion, and only the hat changes. Bunny ears at Easter, orange sunglasses on King's Day, a graduation cap for the back-to-school brunch. He stays recognisable, and the restaurant has something new to show every season.
The website
restaurantpluis.nl has been live since August 2026, in Dutch, German and English. A site of its own instead of a subscription to a website builder. The menu is real text, 145 dishes in 18 sections, instead of a PDF you have to zoom into. Search engines get structured data about the restaurant, the menu, the events and the vacancies.
The forms for contact, job applications and the newsletter run through a dedicated database in the EU.
The game
The site has De pannenkoekensprong, the pancake jump: Pluis bounces up from pancake to pancake by himself and you steer left and right. Five worlds, from the kitchen to Christmas, each with its own look and its own critters. Every month there is a leaderboard for phone and for computer, no account needed. The game art matches the rest of the brand: the same line, colour and shading.
The newsletter as a system
The mailing list moved to the restaurant's own sending account, on its own domain. Every newsletter follows a fixed structure: news, events, spotlight, book a table. The owners drop a topic into a channel in our software, and we write, design and send. A person approves every email before it goes out.
Two systems run around it. Every hour, new sign-ups from the website go to the mailing list, and anyone who ever unsubscribed never gets added back. Every month a report is built from Google Analytics, Search Console and the sending data, in the Pluis house style. We read it through.
The result
One brand, from the brand book to the mascot, the site, the game and the email. A topic comes in, and a newsletter goes out that fits with everything else.
