Photographs: Urban Daddy and designboom

This cozy gastropub in New York and this set of tableware from Taiwanese designer Hsia-Ying Lin have one thing in common. No, not that I can't afford to partake in either (okay, two things in common), but that they are both inspired by the Asian legend of the rabbit in the moon — a story to explain the markings visible on the moon, similar to the Western idea of the Man in the Moon. The folkloric nature of the moon rabbit story, and the fact that multiple cultures have subscribed to the same legend makes it ripe for co-opting. There's even an electronica group named Rabbit In The Moon, which makes me suspect that this is just another cultural zeitgeisty thing we'll all be sick of in three months, like the Alice In Wonderland craze we're (hopefully) past. Lin's bowls are gorgeous, though. Hit the jump for additional pictures of the dishes.

Photograph: bunnyrabbitonthemoon.com

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Here's a video of a chair, which happens to be made out of recycled Coca-Cola bottles, being frozen into a block of ice for a photo shoot. It gives you a little bit of insight into large-scale ice sculpting operations; for example, the giant ice cube, which looks to be about four feet square, takes three weeks to freeze solid. And then they just let it melt! I'll never look at a wedding buffet in the same way again. Video below.

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Photograph via Yanko Design

The simplicity of this design for the Tutti measuring spoon/s, which has 4 different sizes on one individual spoon, is so stupidly obvious that I'm flummoxed as to why I've never seen it before. I say this as someone who considers the ring of measuring spoons one of the most irritating utensils in the kitchen; it's either all over your measuring tool drawer, making noise and getting caught on stuff, or you take it off, and are constantly wondering where the half teaspoon measure got off to. Don't even get me started on the whole "I only used one size but now I have to wash the whole damn ring" issue, and those sliding plastic measuring spoons are just a pain. In any case, thank you, Tutti, for making this culinary curmudgeon's morning.

—Paula Forbes

Still via Yanko Design

This Kitchen of the Future that designer Michaël Harboun envisions is definitely way cooler than that spinning refrigerator imagined by designers in the 1950s. Harboun has created a design for a kitchen with elastic walls that can turn into whatever you need in order to cook a dish, from a faucet to a stove to a colander.

The best part about this imagining is that it's founded on real technology: Claytronics, which is currently being researched at Carnegie Mellon University, is based on millions of tiny nanorobots that act as a giant, moving mass to create different shapes. Yeah, way cooler than a see-through oven. Video below.

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—Paula Forbes

Photograph: DesignMarketo

FoodMarketo, a joint venture between online design store DesignMarketo and Apartamento Magazine, is a pop-up design store/cooking workshop that will take place during Milan Design Week, April 14-19.

Aside from jam and bread-baking workshops that are free and open to the public, the pop-up store will also contain products commissioned to more than 30 international designers and an interior designed by Max Lamb and Lars Frideen. We talked to Marco Velardi of Apartamento about the genesis of the store, and how the designers mix food and design, below.

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Photograph: Paolo Riolzi / Flat Design

In another addition to the cool-yet-mostly-unusable-designer-product file, Flat Design brings us a line of table linens with embroidered designs from international artists and designers such as Karim Rashid and Martin Saemmer. The designs range from geometric and futuristic to sweet and quirky, and the line includes napkins, tea towels and placemats. On the plus side, the designs will hide the Kool-Aid stains nicely. On the negative? They may be too pretty to actually use.

—Rachael Oehring

Live to Cook with dust jacket, and without. Photo collage: Eat Me Daily.

"They didn't want recipes with things like pig's head and I didn't want a cookbook with my picture on the cover," Michael Symon told YumSugar about his book Live to Cook (Amazon). "In the end we compromised. My picture is on the cover and the pig's head ragu is inside." Bad deal, Symon: Sure, that pig's head ragu might be delish, but a book cover's going to outlive you and your recipe. As we noted in our review, Live to Cook is orders of magnitude more compelling and memorable without the cheesy headshot dust jacket — why not just go with that?

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Here's the short video "How do you build a chocolate brand?" about the design and brand development for TCHO, the San Francisco chocolate company, by the design firm Edenspiekermann. See their website for more images.

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Old (left) and new (right).

Francis Mallmann and Peter Kaminsky's Seven Fires (Amazon) won the inaugural Piglet cookbook competition (whoops, spoiler, sorry), and at last night's party we noticed that the hardcover cookbook has graduated to a new cover. Brown gives way to white! Mallmann standing gives way to Mallmann sitting! Center alignment gives way to left and right justification! A Raichlen blurb gives way to one-worders from major dailies! Last night Kaminsky told us that he was pulling for the photograph of Una Vaca Entera to land the cover — pretty as this new one is, we're pretty sure the silhouette of a whole cow being raised on stakes against a rising sun would have been significantly more showstopping.

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Images courtesy of 1800 Tequilla.

These vibrant and brilliant bottles from the second annual 1800 Tequila Essential Artist competition are a sight to behold. A limited series, eleven bottles designs were selected from over 15,000 online submissions along with one from Shepard Fairey's design firm Studio Number One as a special edition “celebrity artist” bottle.

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Pepsi's limited-edition Halloween cans are adorable... if potentially confusing. We can imagine people asking, "What is this new 'Ghost' flavor?" Says @pepsi: "This Halloween, we decided to dress up our products, too!" Walmart only. [via Popsop]

Photographs via writegirl on Flickr and Some Young Punks.

The labels for the Drink 'n' Stick wine by Some Young Punks feature a Bettie Page-esque pin-up girl in lingerie and comes with a sheet of plastic adhesive paper doll-style clothes. Check out a photoset on Flickr to see different permutations. [via Bevlaw]

Evian has a brief history of having teamed with fashion designers, including Christian Lacroix and Jean Paul Gaultier. Available October 31, 2009 for $13.95 at shopevian.com. Also see the Paul Smith for Evian website.

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Here's the stationery for the Vancouver deli/restaurant La Charcuterie that has a sign warning you that the "deli contains Coarse Language and Nudity." Made by Rethink, the business cards are designed to look like slices of cured meats, which are then hung up in netting. Letterhead and envelopes use meat stickers and butcher paper.

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Photographs via Le Fancy

We're liking the photo blog Le Fancy, a pretty astounding collection of page after page of photographs of packaging design. The site is run by nine friends who all grew up together in New York City, but moved to different cities for college, and wanted a way to keep in touch.

Maggie Prendergast, one of the contributors, told us the story behind it: "Since we are all interested in the same things, and all of us are artists, we decided that having a communal blog where we could share the beautiful packages we were seeing around the world would make us all feel closer... The blog not only inspires us (because all we really do is eat) but it keeps us closer on a strange level where even if we don't talk for a month, we can still check out that great can of maple syrup or beautiful bottle of soda."

Left: "Sweet Music." Right: "Trendgemuse," Sarah Illenberger for Neon Magazine. Photos by permission.

Sarah Illenberger is a Berlin-based freelance artist with a unique (and heavily food-themed) editorial portfolio whose work appears in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times Magazine, Neon, and Vanity Fair. Illenberger uses a bevy of real and fabricated food items in her work where no medium (is seemingly) off limits: Reconstructed paper foodstuffs become Chili Con Carne, food metamorphoses into a disturbing collection of faces, and paper muffin cups quickly become makeshift headphones. Although most of her work is freelance, some pieces are available for sale.

Left: Untitled for NYT Magazine Right: Untitled for Neon Magazine, Sarah Illenberger

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Spotted on Ads of the World was this genius series of advertisements promoting the Sydney International Food Festival in which flags are made out of the countries' iconic foodstuffs. By WHYBIN/TBWA out of Sydney, Australia.

If you know your nations' flags, you should be able to identify them pretty quickly, otherwise just look at the food. All of the ads are below — hover over the images to see if you can guess which is which.

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Photos via d-Vision.

The Israeli d-Vision is an industrial design firm / internship program that has generated some genius work, in particular the tableware in the ouTable collection. Smart and (at times) humorous, the designs shows a deep understanding of the relationship between the natural and the man-made. They say: "Nature is rich not only in shapes and patterns but also by the use of material, construction and ‘nature engineering’. From molecules’ structure to the way ice surface will break into cracks, nature is always surprising in the way it can inspire and tell a story." A few of our favorites:

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