Restaurant Logo Development

I'm starting to work on my products for the Bento restaurant, and I thought that the best starting point would be to work on the logo.

With my intended audience being young professionals/adults, I need to find a balance between the fun and colourful japanese style and culture, but also create something that is sophisticated enough to appeal to an adult audience. 

I also want the general brand to have a focus on freshness and balance that is important in their cuisine. 

Playing around with colour and type of illustrator. Although I like the green, I'm not sure if it links well enough to the brand, and whether it would appeal to the audience as much as the red colour, which is brighter and more related to Japan. I do like the go bento typeface, which is called Ripe, as it looks fresh and minimal, but I'm not sure if it would catch a consumers eye or not. 

Playing around with some phrases for the identity, although I can't work out whether people will find them offensive or not. 

I really like the typeface used here, called Ranger, as it reminds me of the typefaces used on Japanese products. The orange and red colours are similar to the colours used in Yo Sushi, which would possibly help people to identify the style of food that Bento is. 

Playing around with the idea of the E as a fork, but I'm not sure this works well as the main Japanese utensil is a chopstick.

I like the use of overlay, but the typeface used doesn't really feel very Japanese to me, and it still feels like there is something missing. 

This one feels too empty, and doesn't really relate to Japan in any way.

This is inspired by a similar logo for a restaurant called Fabrikk, which I found to be really stylish and sophisticated, however, I want to develop it further as at the moment it feels too much like their logo, but I just wanted to use it as a starting point for further exploration. 

I really love the idea of using a circle for the logo, and that, including the colours of red and white all link back to Japan, as the red circle is their flag. 

The Fabrikk logo feels very grown up and stylish, which is exactly what I hope to create with my identity.