New York Gourmet

• Agency: Nikita Fabbro
• Client: Water & Wines
• Category: Print Design — Recreation
• Location: Milan, Italy
• Project Brief: Produce print that communicates New York City’s culinary and cultural landscape through detailed illustration and engaging layout.

Most illustrated city maps flatten everything into the same cute register. Nikita Fabbro's New York Gourmet puzzle goes denser and stranger. It's a 1,000-piece jigsaw that doubles as an illustrated food guide to Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and beyond.

The illustration style carries the whole project. Fabbro draws in a loose, layered line with a warm watercolor palette running from salmon pinks and terracottas through blues and olive greens. Buildings tilt at slight angles.

Neighborhood names run diagonally across their districts in white condensed type, integrating the labels into the landscape rather than floating them above it.

The food illustrations are the discovery layer. Bagels with cream cheese and lox, cocktails, dumplings, burgers, cheesecake slices, and diner milkshakes appear at their geographic origins across the map.

They're drawn at a slightly larger scale than the buildings around them, which gives the cuisine the same visual weight as the architecture. That's a deliberate hierarchy choice: the food is as important as the skyline.

The box interior pulls double duty. One side shows the completed puzzle image. The other side is a full gastronomy guide titled "New York City Gastronomy: Diner Staples," with illustrated entries for pancakes, eggs Benedict, New York-style cheesecake, matzo ball soup, bagels, and bottomless coffee, each with a written description.

The packaging isn't just protection for the pieces. It's supplementary content that extends the experience beyond the puzzle itself.

The box spine carries "NEW YORK" vertically, with the Water & Wines logo, so it reads correctly on a shelf. A small detail, but it shows Fabbro and Water & Wines thought about how the product lives in a home after it's been assembled.

Fabbro made a puzzle that rewards looking closely. The longer you spend with it, the more food references, neighborhood details, and architectural jokes you find. For a 1,000-piece format of recreational print, that density is the design.