What the restaurants of the future will look like
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When the sommelier Yannick Benjamin was planning his East Harlem restaurant Contento, he told his architect that he wanted to make it feel like home, a simple place where diners would step inside and instantly feel comfortable. And he has succeeded: A long, yellow banquette hugs one of the exposed brick walls, and navy blue wallpaper with gold accents is on display in the back. Orb-shaped pendant lights hang over the bronze bar, and the storefront windows open wide so that the interiors and the outdoor dining shed feel almost as if they’re part of the same space. Benjamin will probably be there, too, working the busy room, pouring wine, and making sure his guests feel welcome. But if you ask him what his favorite part of the restaurant is, he’ll tell you it’s the area behind the bar. Benjamin has used a wheelchair since he was 25, and this is the first place he’s worked where he can do a full 360-degree turn.
Every detail in the restaurant has been considered so that customers of all ability levels can comfortably enjoy the space, which has been busy since it opened in June. Next to the bar is a lower counter with five chairs, designed so someone using a wheelchair can just pull up and Benjamin can serve guests eye to eye. They’re the most popular seats in the house. “We’re image conscious in the restaurant industry,” Benjamin says. “And people think accessible design will affect the aesthetics… We have fantastic bartenders, and they all say, ‘I love the counter seating. I can see customers, they can see me, it’s more intimate.’ When the bar is high, it’s like a wall. It lacks that intimacy.”
Contento has been in the works for years, and its owners didn’t plan to open during a global pandemic. But with the exception of an outdoor dining area, they didn’t have to change anything about their design to adapt to the new ways we interact with space. Many of the things they had wanted from the start — completely touchless features in the bathroom and a dining room with movable tables and chairs to accommodate wheelchairs — just made even more sense in the COVID era. Every table is designed to be accommodating, physically and philosophically. “We have a lot of customers who have compromised immune systems, and if someone called and said, ‘I need to have 6 feet of distance,’ we could make that happen,” Benjamin says. “We just move a couple tables. It’s [about] making sure every customer is getting their money’s worth.”
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3lZTtqu A warm, inviting restaurant space with exposed bricks, mustard half banquettes, paired with dark brown tables and leather chairs. Islamic-inspired art hangs on the wall.* Mikhail Lipyanskiy}
For Benjamin, it’s second nature to think about how bodies navigate spaces and what would be considered welcoming and accessible to all people; yet, despite Americans with Disability Act requirements, it’s long been perceived as optional for everyone else. The pandemic, however, has shifted that thinking, as every restaurant has had to contend with ever-changing rules around how their spaces need to function; diverging customer expectations surrounding safety; and a truly different barometer for what it means “to be comfortable and welcoming.”
These new approaches will define the future of restaurant design — even after the threat of a new outbreak or new restrictions has passed. “The only thing that’s certain now is that when people set out to design things, things are going to be different than we think they are,” says David Rockwell, founder of Rockwell Group, the architecture firm behind Nobu, Vandal, and Union Square Cafe. “The need for pivoting and flexibility — that point has been driven home.” Outdoor dining is becoming a mainstay; adaptiveness will be built into designs; and light, air, and space will become even more important, not just to the future of restaurant design but to the health of the industry as a whole.
Over the past year and a half, restaurant design has changed more rapidly than at any other moment in recent memory. Restaurants constructed outdoor dining sheds, moved tables at least 6 feet apart from each other or separated them with acrylic dividers, reduced the surfaces that people touch, and removed paper menus to limit exposure among staff and customers. While the temporary acrylic barriers have mostly come down (it turns out they really didn’t do anything to protect us) and we now know that surface transmission is rare, some of these adaptations will have longer-term viability.
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3lWsg7N New York Chinatown’s Nom Wah Parlor. A narrow street set with outdoor wooden folding dining sets and outdoor umbrellas.* Robert Sietsema}
“Outdoor dining literally saved my business and my staff’s jobs,” says Melba Wilson, owner of the Harlem restaurant Melba’s and president of the New York City Hospitality Alliance. “Permanent outdoor dining is what we need.” At first glance, it seems obvious that outdoor dining will become a fixture in cities; however, restaurants will first need to answer questions about how they will interact with streets, neighborhoods, and cities before they can begin to figure out how they will interact with customers outside.
Yin Kong, the director and co-founder of Think! Chinatown, a New York advocacy group that works with small businesses mostly owned by Asian immigrants, is concerned about the limited public space in her neighborhood and the presence of outdoor dining pavilions. “The businesses here serve a lot of people coming from other [parts] of the city and from New Jersey who are more dependent on cars,” Kong says. “The fight over streets and parking spaces is a bit more ferocious here. Some community members claim that [outdoor dining] impedes pedestrian flow and safety for less mobile people, like seniors.” Meanwhile, Wilson is working with the city to develop a new set of outdoor dining guidelines that will make it more sustainable and standardized than what’s in place now — which is largely a free-for-all.
But at this pivotal moment, and coming on two years of use, many outdoor dining structures are falling apart, owing to shoddy construction and materials that were never meant to withstand inclement weather. And many have simply outlived their usefulness. Tropical Rotisserie, a Dominican American restaurant in the Kingsbridge area of the Bronx, received an outdoor dining structure from a pro bono program and used it for restaurant seating and community events. But it eventually had to be dismantled because of maintenance. Manhattan’s Chinatown received a flurry of outdoor dining pavilions at the beginning of the pandemic — many as part of pro bono programs like Dine Out NYC — and the neighborhood is now at an inflection point. The structures have been helpful to some restaurants, like Sweet House, a dessert shop that had only four seats inside, but weren’t much use to the bigger banquet halls whose main business centered on special events that no amount of outdoor dining could ever replace.
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A+A+A — an experimental design studio run by Andrea Chiney, Arianna Deane, and Ashely Kuo — worked with Think! Chinatown to find ways for outdoor pavilions to be more responsive to the needs of businesses. “In the design industry, there’s this mentality that you put something out into the world, it just kind of stays there, and you don’t really bother with what happens to it later,” Chiney says. The studio had been exploring how to make these structures easier to disassemble so a single build could be repurposed for another business, a move that also addresses sustainability. But now, it’s mostly focused on the beautification of existing structures since the area is currently saturated with pavilions.
Like Kong and A+A+A, architect Michael K. Chen is concerned about the longevity and safety of these structures. The pavilion he designed for Tribeca coffee shop Interlude is made from extruded fiberglass, which is stronger than wood and lighter than metal. The structure is joined with fasteners instead of nails and bolts and is composed of grid-like walls that enable ventilation. “We thought maybe our concerns on airflow are overblown; the pavilion is designed for an earlier phase of this situation,” Chen says. “And then all of a sudden, the design was incredibly prescient [due to the delta variant]. There’s a need to make the outdoors still outdoors.” The walls are movable and can act both as security screens at night and table dividers during the day. “There is so much uncertainty, regulatory and related to the pandemic, so we’re trying to design to those conditions in a way that isn’t wasteful and is mindful of limited resources,” Chen says. “It’s a real challenge, and we haven’t solved it. We’re just trying to see into the future as best we can.”
The restaurants that will be able to make the most out of outdoor dining in the future will have the resources — or pro bono support — to craft their own flexible spaces with some degree of permanence. Indoor-outdoor spaces, in particular, are shaping up to be de rigueur for restaurants planning for a future where some diners will want the safety of being fully outdoors: Atmosphere and vibe are now being balanced with new concerns surrounding safety. “In my entire career, I have never had as many conversations about making people feel safe,” says Brian Wickersham, design director of the Los Angeles-based firm Aux Architecture. “Some people haven’t been out of their homes much over the last 18 months. Right now, a quality experience in a restaurant is about getting rid of people’s anxiety.”
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3BV6Iy2 Rendering of a clean, modern bar space with a slanted ceiling.* AUX Architects}
The Art Room — a creative space in downtown LA with offices, a gallery, and a restaurant helmed by Derek Brandon Walker of the Mar Vista — is set to open this December after facing delays from COVID-19. The developer hit pause on the project around March last year and only decided to move forward after adapting the design. Aux incorporated a more powerful HVAC system with ultraviolet filtration so there’s hospital-grade air inside as well as a “COVID dashboard” that will inform guests about the precautions the building is taking. But the biggest addition is a glass wall that can slide from the front of the building toward the back, allowing the restaurant to choose how much seating is inside or outside. “We think of it as a building that can expand and contract,” Wickersham says.
“The more we feel like we’re outdoors, even when we’re inside, the comfort level goes up,” he adds. “I imagine we’ll have a skylight shortage in 2022.”
Rebecca Rudolph of Design, Bitches, the Los Angeles architecture firm she co-founded with Catherine Johnson, has noticed a growing desire to include outdoor spaces in restaurant design. “One thing that we always think about with our clients, but even more so now, is indoor-outdoor,” she says. Despite Southern California’s good weather, restaurants there haven’t historically emphasized eating outside. And even if they did have outdoor space, it was often used to meet minimum parking requirements mandated by zoning codes. But now, with the city loosening zoning regulations as a form of COVID relief and the popularity of eating outside rising, restaurants are finally willing to make the trade-off, and Rudolph is asking, “How can we make use of any outdoor space? If we don’t have it, how do we create it?”
Rudolph and Johnson have found that clients now want to invest in indoor-outdoor ideas that were a hard sell a few years ago. For Sunny’s, a forthcoming restaurant for the Silver Lake outpost of retail store Neighborhood Goods, Design, Bitches is building a rooftop deck. For Baldy’s Grocer, an upcoming marketplace in Mar Vista that will also have sit-down dining, Rudolph and Johnson are making outdoor space by building a “second storefront” out of a glass curtain wall about 10 feet into the building’s footprint. The marketplace’s stucco facade has lots of large windows, and by removing the glass from them, the area becomes like a screened-in porch with seating. They’re also incorporating the same sort of indoor-outdoor area in the renovation of Button Mash, an arcade and restaurant that temporarily closed last fall. “Before, people did not want to lose that interior leasable square footage by pulling a storefront back,” Johnson said. “Now there’s more value in having that flexible in-between space.”
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The desire to appeal to customers through indoor-outdoor spaces is fueling flexibility in the very construction of restaurant storefronts. The takeout window was already gaining steam before the pandemic, and as its popularity continues to spike, architects are designing ways to make takeout more seamless. Oakland, California’s Lumpia Company and LA’s Win-dow, which both opened in 2019, only ever offered window service, but now restaurants that offer sit-down and takeout meals are asking for this feature as a way to meet the needs of their customers and support additional lines of business. Restaurants still want to give customers who don’t dine in an experience — and not one that’s like picking up fast food. “I imagine the pickup window will evolve to have more of a chance for hospitality between the customer and the person preparing their food, instead of it being an afterthought of sticking food through a window,” Rockwell says. His firm is exploring takeout windows for future locations of Daily Provisions, Danny Meyer’s all-day New York cafe.
But despite the popularity and convenience of takeout, the dining room isn’t going anywhere. So architects are now tasked with reacting to diners’ new feelings about what makes them feel comfortable and addressing those desires in more subtle ways. “People don’t want to be reminded [of the pandemic],” Rockwell says. Recently, he has been prescribing what he calls “microsurgery” to address COVID-19 concerns from his firm’s clients — small moves like adding the takeout window, touchless faucets, and distancing measures that dictate the placement of tables and flow of people through the space. The latter is a generous move, pandemic or not, since many restaurants, especially in big cities, have been cramming seats closer and closer together. “I think the interesting restaurants will be those that incorporate what’s always signaled safety: fresh air, outdoor space, and an open yet embracing feeling,” Rockwell says.
For a forthcoming Manhattan location of Zaytinya, Jose Andres’s Mediterranean restaurant, Rockwell Group is keeping the space as open as possible. The kitchen and the dining areas are separated only by pendant lighting fixtures, and to keep a connection to the outside, there’s only a sheer blue-ombre curtain over the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. The architects are also incorporating free-standing woven-leather privacy screens between tables and banquettes — a far cry from those useless acrylic dividers. “People crave communal experiences and connections to places that trigger memories,” Rockwell says. “It’s about establishing new rituals and protocols that encourage safety and security, that are seamless with the restaurant experience.”
But the things we loved about restaurants aren’t going away. There’s a current of proprietors and designers who are planning for post-pandemic dining rooms that look a lot like they did pre-pandemic. “We have a few clients who have basically expressed this feeling of: Outdoor dining is helping; we’re not going to dramatically renovate our interior,” says Rus Mehta, co-founder of GRT Architects, which is in the process of renovating and restoring a historic New York City restaurant. “There’s a school of thought that says, It has to go back to normal.”
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3C1FCVV A darkened restaurant with hundreds of pink neon lights hanging from the ceiling giving the room an electric glow.* Stephan Werk}
Going back to “normal” means leaning into the attributes that made dining out fun, entertaining, and memorable. A hefty part of that is the atmosphere. At the start of the pandemic, AvroKO — an international design firm behind New York City restaurants Beauty & Essex, Ghost Donkey, and Saxon + Parole — received a flood of calls from clients asking about COVID adaptations. But when it actually came time to design, AvroKO’s clients were planning for a future where most guests’ concerns about the virus would be addressed by the vaccines. Kimberly Jackson, the firm’s managing director, sees guest safety as an operational challenge, not a design problem. “When we consider the interior design as part of the full experience of going to a restaurant, we want to acknowledge the need to help alleviate any personal discomfort; however, we don’t want to put the solutions so far forward in the design that they distract from the main reason more and more people are starting to return to restaurants: to reconnect with family, friends, and their community,” Jackson says. “It’s a delicate balance that we work with our clients on individually.”
In May, AvroKO opened a Denver location of Ghost Donkey, a tequila and mezcal bar, and kept the design concept the same as the original New York City space, which closed during the pandemic. Think neon lights around the bar, dim lighting, big booths, and purple Christmas lights hanging from a drop ceiling. It also opened the Twelve Thirty Club in Nashville, Tennessee, a swanky 400-person restaurant and bar done up with wood-paneled walls, velvet club chairs, herringbone floors, and a polished-wood bar. “Restaurateurs still want to be on the top of all the lists — great design, great food, the best destination restaurant,” says Nick Solomon, AvroKO’s chief creative officer. “Achieving that by prioritizing comfort doesn’t necessarily work. Ultimately, the successful ‘pragmatic restaurant’ is still to be seen.”
But restaurants can’t totally look back to the past, especially those that are working with ever-tightening margins and want to serve as many customers as they can. A month after Daniel Bendjy and Myo Moe opened Rangoon, their Burmese bistro in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, New York City went into lockdown. “Our floor plan was absolutely not suited for the pandemic,” Bendjy says. “We forwent seating in favor of atmosphere.” The small, minimalist restaurant — done up beautifully by the design firms Outpost Architecture and Saw.Earth — featured a louvered facade, white tile floors, white-painted brick, perforated white metal screens, and bentwood stools. The space was mostly bar seating, plus a six-person booth and a tall communal table in the back, but it wasn’t until recently that people could dine inside. It was only because of outdoor dining and takeout that Rangoon made it to its one-year anniversary.
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/2XusHgp A white, airy interior bar with wicker, backless stools.* Alex Staniloff}
So when Bendjy and Moe started to plot their next restaurant — a yet-to-be-named place in Manhattan opening in early 2022 — they made sure space wouldn’t limit their business. The restaurant will have more floor space and a backyard. They’re planning to have a mix of booths and cafe-style tables and chairs that can easily be joined together. And the patio will have an outdoor bar they can use year-round. About half of the restaurant’s seating will be outside, too. “Having the flexibility to social distance when necessary is preloaded into the floor plan,” Bendjy says.
As restaurants gird themselves through design that addresses the demands of the pandemic, there are more challenges to come. Ultimately, a future of restaurant design that takes into account comfort and accessibility for all guests, and looks great while doing so, will be a successful one. Some of the features that restaurants are now leaning into feel a lot like the basic principles of universal design, or the idea that products and environments ought to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible without adaptation or specialization.
For Contento’s Yannick Benjamin, the need for a flexible plan has always been obvious. “People will visit you knowing they won’t have to deal with barriers, obstructions, or moments of embarrassment,” he says. “This taps into a whole population of 60 million people with disabilities who are ready to spend money and have a good time.” And with the lessons of the pandemic still being taught, hopefully more and more restaurants will adopt the architecture-for-all-customers ethos that universal design extols. That’s the future restaurants need. That’s true hospitality.
Diana Budds is a New York-based writer who covers design, architecture, cities, and culture.
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Since the early 2010s, excusing yourself to a restaurant bathroom has brought the possibility of walking into a unique soundscape. You might find a musical genre different from the one blasting from the dining room speakers. Or you might be greeted with a spoken-word performance or a single song on repeat. Unlike the main restaurant space, which is beholden to the demands of dining comforts, the restaurant bathroom is truly a place to play. And the soundtrack doesn’t have to be music at all. At René Redzepi’s Noma in 2015, the bathroom played a 67-minute “sound piece” that was recorded at a farm and the restaurant and featured both the bucolic sounds of clucking chickens and the murmurs of a staff meeting.
Whether these are the noises most customers wish to hear while attending to their needs in a bathroom is almost beside the point — a unique soundtrack makes a trip to the bathroom mandatory, whether you have to go or not. And years later, even if we remember nothing else about the dining experience, we will likely remember the bathroom that piped in the sounds of barnyard animals or a TV theme song or a Korean fairy tale.
TV theme songs
In the earliest days of my blogging at Eater — we’re talking spring 2013, when Obama was president, Cronuts were new, and the Hunger Games movie series was still going — one of the coolest places to be was at Mission Chinese on the Lower East Side. (This was before we knew the extent to which the kitchen culture was utterly dysfunctional.) And as far as I knew, the Mission Chinese bathroom was the first to make full use of an unexpected pop culture soundtrack: a never-ending loop of the Twin Peaks theme song. This was a bathroom that was committed to the bit, too. It was dark and tinted red, and there was a framed portrait of Laura Palmer on the wall. The whole vibe was equally kitschy and hip; Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic theme just as easily provided the background music to a party kid’s line of coke as it did the escape from a bad OkCupid date. It was totally out of left field, transportive, and tongue-in-cheek. It ruled. Then, Mission Cantina, which opened later that year, went arguably weirder and scored the postage-stamp-size bathroom with the Friends theme song. Peeing, for me at least, was suddenly a timed sport — it’s not an easy song to listen to, and in a confined space, I can’t say it made me linger. But it did make me laugh. — Hillary Dixler Canavan
A bedtime story
The bathroom at Arlo Grey within the Line Hotel is a loving tribute to chef Kristen Kish’s mother. When Kish, who is adopted, was younger, her mother used to read her Cinderella. And since the restaurant is really an expression of the chef’s life story, a Korean version of the fairy tale is played over the bathroom speakers. The English translation of that specific story is also written out all over the white walls and stalls of the bathroom. There is something intimate and soothing about hearing a woman recount this story in a language foreign to me. Just as Kish intended, it’s as if I’m overhearing a mother reading a bedtime story to her daughter. — Nadia Chaudhury
The single-song playlist
I couldn’t tell you about many of my first special New York dining experiences. But it would be pretty much impossible to forget the experience of stepping into the bathroom at Lalito for the first time. The since-closed California-ish, Mexican-ish, Southern-ish restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown went through a lot of culinary transformations during its time, but its bathroom never changed. The closet-size room was almost too dark to actually use without fear of some terrible accident. Fake plants covered pretty much every square inch of real estate, and when you tried to use the hand dryer, the hot air pushed the entire wall of plastic ferns up, lashing you in the face. But the most incredible aspect of that bizarre bathroom was the soundtrack — which was really just one song, Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting for Tonight,” playing over and over and over until last call. Lalito may be nothing more than a memory, but that bathroom and its one-song playlist lives on in the mind of every New Yorker who had to pee during dinner. — Elazar Sontag
Language lessons
There’s no greater reminder that you’re inside Seattle’s Coastal Kitchen than a visit to the restroom. Coastal Kitchen’s gimmick is a rotating breakfast and lunch menu featuring seafood dishes that spotlight regional cooking around the world, so the soundtrack blaring into stalls is designed to train listeners in the language of the coastal region featured on the restaurant menu that day. That means one day you might be listening to a Spanish language course after dining on Barcelona specialties and, on another, learning French before going back to a table filled with French Caribbean cuisine. I’m not sure it’s exactly “transportive,” but it’s an amusing touch that has stayed in my memory for a long time afterward, kind of like a good vacation. — Brenna Houck
A voice from beyond
During the four years I lived in San Francisco, it seemed like restaurant designers would do anything to one-up each other, particularly when it came to bathroom ambience — no potted plant, high-thread-count hand towel, or aggressively patterned wallpaper was spared. But it wasn’t until I visited Bird Dog, a meticulously appointed restaurant in Palo Alto, that I understood just how high the stakes had become. When I walked into the bathroom, I was greeted by the melodious chortle of Julia Child, a recording of her voice piped through the loudspeakers. It was jarring and deeply strange: I felt less like I’d entered the loo than another dimension, one in which Julia Child was somehow watching me pee like Moaning Myrtle. But it was also oddly comforting, in the way of a lullaby sung by a benevolent ghost. While I have no idea if this was the intended effect of whoever decided that would be the bathroom’s soundtrack, another, perhaps more obvious, goal had been achieved: While I can’t remember anything I ate at the restaurant, I will never forget its toilet. So to whoever was responsible for that quirk of design: Congratulations, you won. — Rebecca Flint Marx
Hillary Dixler Canavan is Eater’s restaurant editor; Nadia Chaudhury is the editor of Eater Austin; Elazar Sontag is a staff writer at Eater; Brenna Houck is an Eater cities manager; and Rebecca Flint Marx is a senior editor at Eater.
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Some would have you believe that dining out is all about the food — where to eat, what to order, whether the photo you took of those chilaquiles is well-lit enough to post — but savvy diners know that going to a restaurant is as much about comfort as it is about cooking. Nothing can make a restaurant meal go from great to grumpy more than spending all night fidgeting in an uncomfortable chair.
So many restaurant seats are noticeably bad. With limited space and even more limited budgets, restaurant designers often have to do a lot with a little — and seating can feel like an afterthought. From the woefully small to the unpleasantly sticky, creaky, and ergonomically wacky, here are the six least comfortable restaurant chairs, ranked from bad to worst.
{PHOTO ~ HALF-LEFT | https://ift.tt/2ZaagOR An isolated image of a restaurant booth. A blocky L-shaped padded seat with reflective vinyl upholstery.* Scott Gelber}
6. Vinyl diner booths
Friendly’s, Nifty Fifty’s, and other nostalgia-satisfying diners are known as much for those squishy vinyl booths as they are for upside-down ice cream sundaes. And while the best setting in which to enjoy burgers and fries while wearing a paper crown is in the least rigid chair possible, the glittery, sticky vinyl booths that greasy spoons are known for tend to mimic the experience of getting your legs waxed on a hot summer day. Even worse, the core strength it takes to dislodge yourself from the deep fold in the booth is equivalent to the gains from at least three CrossFit classes.
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3pjo04t A coated-metal chair with a single leg that attaches to the ground via a round base.* Scott Gelber}
5. Bolted-down swivel stools
There are logical reasons a restaurant might want to literally bolt its stools to the ground: It negates the need to set up or break down the dining room. Swiveling around in a chair is one of life’s most pleasant sensations. And patrons who want to escape from the dining room with a free stool will really have to put in elbow grease to pull it off. But this dedication to fun and no fuss comes at the expense of actual comfort. The seats are uncomfortably small and rigid, and the metal and plastic is molded in contours that no body over the age of 6 actually has. Even swiveling comes at a price.
{PHOTO ~ HALF-LEFT | https://ift.tt/3DXKGLQ A silver metal chair with four legs an open back with one support brace and no cushion.* Scott Gelber}
4. That silver metal chair
Ubiquity does not equal comfort, and, boy, are these ubiquitous. Can we at least get a cushion?
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3aXRa0J A four-legged chair with woven plastic fabric to create a seat and back.* Scott Gelber}
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3. Plastic rattan outdoor chairs
Is there a greater deception than being offered a chair that appears ergonomically devised for a relaxing evening on an outdoor patio with refreshing drinks and well-crisped tortilla chips — only to learn that the lip of the chair is somehow much higher than the seat? This specific kind of vinyl rattan chair manages to propel your knees upward, leaving your legs dangling slightly above the ground while your butt slides hopelessly backward, making you look like a child holding a margarita. And those rattan imprints on your legs can last for hours.
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3B2AOOO A flimsy-looking wooden chair with four legs a round seat and an arched back frame with no support.* Scott Gelber}
2. French wooden cafe chairs
Ah, Parisian restaurant design: how chic, how iconique, how elevated. Mais non — when it comes to those rickety wooden bistro chairs with curved backs, even the French got something wrong. The seats are too small, and the backs aren’t supportive. One wrong move and the whole thing feels as if it will snap like a twig. The legs are the most baffling part, as they manage to bow outward like bell-bottoms, which is legit so confusing that it’s almost inspiring to behold.
{PHOTO ~ HALF-LEFT | https://ift.tt/3vsQbyZ A metal stool with four legs a flat seat, and no seatback.* Scott Gelber}
1. High stools with low or no backs
There is a special bar seat in hell for whoever decided that restaurant high stools should have no backs. The posture-adjusting it requires to sit up straight enough to not look like a medieval ogre while also maintaining the ability to lean down and eat your meal without it dripping from great heights is a balancing act that no person two cocktails in should have to perform. The ways that restaurant stools try to make up for this are legion — molded seats, footrest crossbars, those little tiny backs that are a sneeze in the direction of lumbar support — but the only things that will do are plush seats, a swivel option, and armrests.
Dayna Evans is a writer and editor in Philadelphia.
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Bathrooms are often my favorite part of a restaurant’s design. Even though my selfie skills are subpar, I excitedly snapped a shot in the well-documented, colorful (but now permanently closed) bathroom at Please in Cincinnati. In the powder room at the Grill in New York, I touched up my red lipstick with the help of softly glowing globe lights affixed to the mirror, a look so iconic I eventually commissioned a small painting of the space. And at the now-shuttered Lalito on the Lower East Side — my favorite restaurant bathroom ever — I watched green dots strobe across the dim space and admired the lush faux plants that hung from the ceiling years ahead of the trend, all set to a looping soundtrack of Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting for Tonight.” Lalito’s bathroom was transportive and weird and fun.
But before a restaurant bathroom can be as great as any of the ones above, it first needs to be good. And a restaurant bathroom simply cannot be good unless its doors have a lock that actually fucking works.
{PULLQUOTE ~ CENTER | While I can’t remember anything I ate at the restaurant, I will never forget its toilet }
Restaurant bathrooms are private spaces in public places. They are where we go to hit pause, re-collect ourselves, and, especially when it comes to taking bathroom selfies, figure out which version of ourselves we want to bring back out into the dining room. They are also where we deal with our bladders and bowels and take care of some of our most basic physical needs. So it’s impossible to feel as cool as a restaurant’s design wants you to if you don’t feel relaxed when using the bathroom for its ultimate purpose. And to feel relaxed, you must first feel safe and secure. Truly, there is no status candle or mood lighting that can make up for someone walking in on you while you pee.
Too many restaurant bathroom stalls have broken slide-latch locks and perilous gaps between the door and the frame. And when you encounter a blessed single-occupancy restroom (truly the best and safest type of bathroom, particularly as hateful ‘bathroom bills’ put trans people in danger), push-button or twist-lock doorknobs are often deceptive.
There’s a particular dance I dread that goes something like this: I squint in fuzzy light at the door handle to make sure I understand how to lock it. I push the button in the handle’s lock but can’t tell whether it worked, so I go ahead and test the handle to determine if I have now unlocked it, proving I had successfully locked it in the first place. Then I relock it, head to the toilet, wonder if I, in fact, did relock it, go back, repeat at least one more time, and then just throw all caution to the wind and hope for the best.
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The best bathroom locks are intuitive. My strong preference is for basic deadbolt-style locks because I can easily see when the lock is engaged. Deadbolt locks are also remarkably easy to operate while holding a paper towel, my preferred way of engaging with bathroom doors for sanitary reasons. And even though it kind of kills the vibe on the other side of the door, I also appreciate when bathrooms have a vacant/occupied indicator. There’s nothing quite like someone knocking to make you feel guilty for having a human body with human needs.
While seemingly not as big a decision as selecting a wallpaper or soundtrack, choosing the right lock is utterly essential. Restaurant bathrooms have long been where some of the best design in the business happens, but it’s also where our own business happens. And I’d prefer to keep mine — and yours — private, behind a door with a good lock.
Hillary Dixler Canavan is Eater’s restaurant editor.
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In theory, banquette seating is wonderful. You meet up with a bunch of friends at your favorite restaurant for a boozy brunch or a celebratory dinner, and you pack yourselves cozily into an L- or U-shaped bench upholstered with one supple fabric or another — Leather? Brushed cotton? Velvet? — to talk shit about that weirdo cousin who keeps trying to involve you in a multilevel marketing scheme on Facebook. The couch-like seating, most commonly seen nestled against walls and enveloping groups of gossipers, seems like the ideal response to the wide array of bad restaurant chairs. Because banquettes are typically designed to ensure that every diner at the table can easily interact with one another — while inside an intimate cocoon away from the hustle and bustle of the restaurant — no one misses out, and everyone can engage in the shit-talking. Encouraging and facilitating these kinds of hyper-social gatherings is no doubt a worthy purpose, but banquette seating isn’t without its faults either — and those faults can outweigh the restaurant designer’s good intentions.
Most notably, banquettes, especially the L- or U-shaped versions, are often inaccessible to wheelchair users and people with other disabilities. In these instances — which make up a not insignificant number of restaurant banquettes — the portion of the table that does not abut any part of the bench is generally meant to be where servers approach the seated party to discuss the menu, take down orders, and drop off food. It’s not meant to be where a diner using a wheelchair can sit. Even if logistics can be shuffled around to allow a wheelchair user to post up on the outside edge of a banquette, most banquette tables are too high for wheelchair users, and many lack any real storage for canes, crutches, or walkers. Plainly put, banquette seating was not designed with wheelchair users or people with other disabilities in mind, and no last-minute maneuvering can change that. (Restaurants have a long history of ignoring the Americans with Disabilities Act, so this isn’t exactly surprising, though it’s certainly depressing.)
{PULLQUOTE ~ CENTER | For countless people with disabilities, banquettes are untenable}
Peneliope Richards, an Afro-Panamanian writer with cerebral palsy who lives in New York and recently wrote for Eater about accessibility in restaurants, says that banquettes and booths both “may create the feeling of being in the way since we usually sit facing the booth as waitstaff and other customers attempt to fit past us to get to tables or restrooms.” And, Richards notes, eateries that use banquettes and booths as their seating style may be unintentionally excluding people with disabilities from their experience. “For example,” Richards says, “if a crew of six people — including three wheelchair users — come to a restaurant like this, there’s a high chance they’ll be eating at separate tables or not being accommodated at all.”
The inability to accommodate wheelchair users isn’t the only accessibility issue created by banquette seating, of course. I’ve spent years with my older brother, who has cerebral palsy and is visually impaired, as he’s struggled to navigate unnecessarily tight spaces. To slide into a booth or banquette, he must contort his body in ways that are uncomfortable and sometimes painful. Banquette seating presents a legitimately dangerous situation for him, so each time we go to a restaurant, we request to be seated at a standalone table — preferably not a high-top, which is also terrible — with movable chairs. For countless people with disabilities, banquettes are untenable.
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And, for many, banquettes can be claustrophobic. If you are the unfortunate soul who ends up seated in the middle of a big group, it can be overwhelmingly difficult to get up to go to the bathroom, step outside for a breath of fresh air, or simply enjoy a moment free from knocking knees and elbows and thus messing up the entire table’s vibe. This can be even harder for people with larger body types or different ability statuses. No one wants to be the person who has to ask four, five, or however many people to disrupt their meal while they awkwardly scoot off the plush restaurant couch and shuffle toward the bathroom, only to do it all over again when they return minutes later. For the anxious among us, sitting on the inside of a booth can be tantamount to standing in front of the class in one’s underwear. But in this scenario, it’s more of a waking nightmare.
The allure of the banquette is obvious — having a sense of intimacy while still being engulfed by a given restaurant’s atmosphere is exciting! — but its many hindrances nullify its appeal. Groups have been sitting around ordinary tables in ordinary chairs since time immemorial without feeling as though they’re somehow missing out on something — and without excluding entire groups of people. Banquettes are terrible; it’s time to get rid of them.
Terrence Doyle is a writer based in Boston. He understands if you hold that against him.
At Under, diners sit in a room immersed 16 feet into the frothing seas along the craggy coast of Lindesnes, Norway, eating ingredients like sea arrow grass and salty sea kale, as if to confirm that they are indeed at Europe’s first underwater restaurant. At Copenhagen, Denmark’s Alchemist, housed in the former set workshop of the Royal Danish Theatre, guests spend the duration of a 50-course tasting menu under a domed, planetarium-like ceiling on which projections of the ocean or a twinkling night sky move and change; it’s one of several design elements meant to form a holistic experience that engulfs the diner. And at Carbone’s new South Beach outpost, painted beams mimic malachite and the walls are sheathed in a custom velvet damask — cinematic touches that make the guests themselves feel like the star of a meal.
“A restaurant environment is a lot like theater — on a stage, the actors need to have a clear pathway so they don’t fall, and the audience needs to ‘read’ the cues of what to expect,” says Ellen Fisher, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the New York School of Interior Design. At a restaurant, design takes into account not just the visual set dressing but also every element that dictates how diners will interact with the space: how they might press their bodies together to fit into a booth, how the weight of a dining chair feels when they pull it from the table, how much their pupils dilate in response to dimmed lighting. These are the all-important cues that tell an audience of diners “this place is expensive,” “this place is intimate,” “this place is welcoming.”
Design firms are often the ones tasked with subtly (or not so subtly) creating those cues, and frequently, they’re pushing the proverbial envelope when it comes to what dining experiences can be. It was the Oslo, Norway-based design firm Snøhetta that managed to create the feeling of being comfortably shipwrecked at Under; Studio Duncalf crafted an upscale planetarium at Alchemist; and Ken Fulk is the designer responsible for making Miami’s Carbone feel like the place to be.
Because the first thing you register when you step into a restaurant is the way the space looks, restaurant design is often discussed in terms of the immediate: the biggest trends, the recurring atmospheres, and the vibes that both respond to and drive how diners want to interact with restaurants right now. Here are five of the design firms at the forefront of that conversation:
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History Reborn with Roman and Williams
When chef Daniel Rose’s Le Coucou opened in New York in 2016, diners flooded Instagram with images of its Francophile-leaning interiors by Roman and Williams. Founded in 2002, the New York City-based firm designs restaurants as well as residences, retail, and custom pieces, such as handsome walnut dining tables and burnished-brass and glass-pendant lights made in France.
Roman and Williams is renowned across the globe for its “eccentric neo-traditional” work, says co-founder and principal Stephen Alesch, and it has won myriad awards, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. “We like to flow with a continuation of historical approaches and not destroy them or wipe them away,” Alesch says. “We prefer to build on them and play with them and invent new forms with them.”
{Photo ~ FULL | https://ift.tt/3E2F0Ad A restaurant interior split in half by a dramatic archway. On one side is set up for dining and the other for shopping an array of dishware.* Robert Wright/La Mercerie; https://ift.tt/3aSQ0DB A curved blue velvet banquette with an elegantly set table.* Zeph Colombatto/La Mercerie; https://ift.tt/3jgaA5h An atrium with a dining area on the first floor, plant-filled balconies, and a glass-pane roof from which lanterns hang at varying heights.* Simon Upton/NoMad London; https://ift.tt/3pofscy In a plant-filled restaurant dining room inside an atrium, there’s a row of small round tables with a single, long green banquette on one side and chairs on the other.* Simon Upton/NoMad London; https://ift.tt/2Xxr8yg A long dining table covered with a linen tablecloth, place settings, and green floral arrangements in clear glass vases.* Andrea Gentl and Martin Hyers/La Mercerie}
At Le Coucou, this approach is evidenced by an 18th century-inspired French landscape mural, hand-painted by Dean Barger, and artful, vintage details like circa 1925 Thonet armchairs newly upholstered in olive green velvet. The NoMad London, a recent Roman and Williams project, features a glass-ceilinged, three-story atrium space; the hotel is designed to feel like “a secret garden in the [19th-century] Bow Street courthouse and police station,” says Robin Standefer, the firm’s other co-founder and principal.
“Taking a space with a heavy past and so much complexity and invading it with something beautiful, detailed, and memorable is a signature of RW,” Alesch says.
Even in a newly constructed contemporary space, a sense of story carries over. At La Mercerie, tucked inside the Roman and Williams Guild shop in New York’s Soho, thick marble slab counters and a “watery-blue” color palette summon Old World Paris. The plates were carefully selected to “break free” from the usual oversize white version used in fine dining restaurants. “[They’re] all studio pottery and handmade,” Standefer says. “People just love the experience of being able to eat off of objects that are not generic.” And it perfectly suits the Roman and Williams aesthetic: nodding to the past and embracing luxury in the present.
New Narratives with AvroKO
At Single Thread in Healdsburg, California, AvroKO’s elaborate visual tales emerge in full force. There, the owners’ love for the earth is reflected in floral arrangements under glass terrariums and even, more subtly, in the dining room screens, which are woven in patterns that summon the DNA sequences of herbs.
The New York City-based studio AvroKO, which won a James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant Design for Single Thread in 2017, prides itself on “narrative-based design,” according to managing director Kimberly Jackson. “We use interwoven narratives to craft layered, textured, detailed spaces that are the tangible realization of the restaurateur’s vision.”
{PHOTO ~ FULL | https://ift.tt/2Z4q8lJ A rectangular bar in the center of a room with wood counters, a warmly lit selection of alcohol, and backless stools* Galdones Photography/Momotaro; https://ift.tt/2ZcSH0r A light, airy dining room, with blue-tiled floors, blue-upholstered U-shaped banquettes, white walls, and a large chandelier.* Andrew Thomas Lee/The Wayward; https://ift.tt/3psph9g Alt text.* Andrew Thomas Lee/The Wayward; https://ift.tt/3aTtoTk A wood-filled restaurant dining room, including wood high-top tables, wood support columns, patterned hardwood floors, brown brick walls.* Andrew Thomas Lee/The Wayward}
This translates as much to carefully selected small details as it does to obvious choices like wallcoverings and chairs. “[At Chicago’s Momotaro] we installed a working 1960s pink pay phone that plays a random selection of Japanese audio clips from movies, commercials, music, and pink films,” Jackson says. At Nan Bei, a restaurant located on the 19th floor of the Rosewood hotel in Bangkok, AvroKO installed 800 hand-folded brass and LED magpies that dangle in the 22-foot-high atrium.
AvroKO is always aiming to whip up memorable experiences, says chief creative officer Nick Solomon. “These moments are enforced through layered narrative, clever design, and operational prowess: the booth that hugs you and keeps you for hours, palettes of materials that speak to a sense of place or culinary tradition, convenience and surprise in the unspoken details, and a sense of the unique — something which cannot be replicated.”
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Fun Meets Functional with Bells + Whistles
Bells + Whistles’ co-founder and creative director Barbara Rourke knows that it’s vital to connect a restaurant’s design with the chef’s vision for the food. “What we try to do is get to know our client on a personal level and design things that feel authentic to them, like they were designing it themselves,” Rourke says. It’s an approach that’s paid off since the Los Angeles-based commercial project design firm was founded in 2000 to tackle a variety of spaces, from hospitality to multiunit residential.
Rourke likens the design process to weaving together a complete circle and says that everything — including the menu, aesthetics of the space, branding, and every touch point the guest encounters — should fall in line with a single vision, lest the space feel awkward. “You’ve gone into places and been like, ‘Oh wow, there’s no connection here between the design and what they’re trying to do as far as the food,” Rourke says.
{PHOTO ~ FULL | https://ift.tt/3G74vBY A restaurant dining room, with multiple seating areas, including a red banquette along one wall, set apart with olive drapery, green velvet U-shaped banquettes down the center, and cream-colored booths and round tables.* Dustin Bailey/Animae; https://ift.tt/3C1ejLt Large, round olive green velvet banquettes in an art-deco inspired dining room.* Dustin Bailey/Animae; https://ift.tt/3nhmpK2 Round olive green velvet banquettes underneath dramatic olive drapery.* Dustin Bailey/Animae; https://ift.tt/3lYyGmV Large, round olive green velvet banquettes in an art-deco inspired dining room.* Dustin Bailey/Animae; https://ift.tt/3lWhbUd The view from a seat at the bar into a dining room with dramatic drapery and bronze-colored chandeliers.* Dustin Bailey/Animae; https://ift.tt/3G4BmaM A seating area with green velvet couches and cylindrical side tables.* Dustin Bailey/Animae}
A singular vision is paramount at San Diego’s Animae steakhouse, which combines Art Deco lines with a palette pulled from the dense cedar forests of Japan’s Yakushima Island. It’s a look intended to “create so much theater and drama,” Rourke says. Case in point: 21-foot-long draped curtains in olive green velvet and a custom 100 percent wool carpet in mottled greens and golds that resembles “lichen in a forest.”
But for Bells + Whistles, the goal isn’t just to design a restaurant that looks good; functionality is paramount. The luxe carpet at Animae has a hidden benefit: “If someone did stain it, you wouldn’t be able to tell,” Rourke says. The use of all that fabric, generally, serves a purpose. “You can have a conversation in there without screaming — the acoustics are amazing.” And in every project it designs, the Bells + Whistles team tries to create myriad seating areas within the same space “so you can come back multiple times and have different experiences.”
At the end of the day, Bells + Whistles designs restaurants to run smoothly. When a kitchen planner — an expert hired by restaurateurs to lay out a functional workspace — recently wanted to put the door at one end of a long and skinny restaurant “a thousand steps from one end to the other,” Bells + Whistles fought to make the portal central for ease of use. Says Rourke, “If a restaurant doesn’t work, then it’s not going to succeed.”
Over-the-Top Luxe with Nina Magon Studio
Sumptuous luxury — and lots of it — is what Houston-based designer Nina Magon’s restaurateur clients are after when they hire her firm, which was founded in 2008 and designs residential estates, hotels, restaurants, and more (the company’s name changed from Contour Interior Design earlier this year). “Bigger is better — people are coming [to restaurants] for an experience… something clients are going to remember you or the restaurant by,” she says.
{PHOTO ~ FULL | https://ift.tt/3lY8Kbl A sparsely furnished room, with sets of two blue velvet chairs and low metallic tables alongside a large marble strip on the floor .* Nina Magon/51 Fifteen at Saks Fifth Avenue; https://ift.tt/2ZcjFFB A lobby-like seating area with a marble aisle running down the floor leading to a wall covered with an abstract, black-and-white photograph.* Nina Magon/51 Fifteen at Saks Fifth Avenue; https://ift.tt/3G4ZhGT A restaurant dining room with a mix of round tables and square tables and a marble wall at the back of the room.* Nina Magon/51 Fifteen at Saks Fifth Avenue; https://ift.tt/3jiZe0H A seating area with a large black and white photo of an abstracted flower.* Nina Magon/51 Fifteen at Saks Fifth Avenue; https://ift.tt/3DZ9PWl A restaurant dining room with blue velvet banquettes and a marble wall with an octagonal pattern.* Nina Magon/51 Fifteen at Saks Fifth Avenue}
Magon’s most high-profile project was the relaunch of Houston restaurant 51 Fifteen inside Saks Fifth Avenue. “When we designed 51 Fifteen, we did the largest installation of Dekton [a high-performance manmade surface similar to quartz] in the United States, hanging octagon shapes from the ceiling,” Magon says. With its towering gold champagne shelving, the black, white, and marbleized cocktail bar is now “a huge Instagram spot — everyone takes pictures there,” thanks in part to an oversize black-and-white floral wall.
The designer finds that when a space is beautifully and functionally designed, Insta-worthiness is always a side benefit. “Uniqueness is a trend now,” Magon says. “Copying is easy. Being unparalleled and distinctive is what our industry needs to stay alive and be valued,” she says. For Magon, being distinctive often translates to palpable glamour. And the designer firmly believes that “there’s still a demand for the high-end restaurants where people can dress up.”
Earthy Elegance with Montalba Architects
Montalba Architects, founded by David Montalba in 2004 and based in both Santa Monica, California, and Lausanne, Switzerland, is known for designing sceney restaurants like Nobu Malibu — which sits inside a bleached wood and stone structure abutting the Pacific Ocean — and Santa Monica’s Cassia, an industrial space with polished concrete finishes located in an Art Deco building. Its design philosophy is to create an airy feel that blends “interior and exterior spaces into a single, fluid experience that infuses natural light, air, and views throughout as much of the interior as possible,” Montalba says.
{PHOTO ~ FULL | https://ift.tt/3G28ccn The wood paneled entryway to a wood-and-cream dining room. To the left of the entryway, on a cream colored fabric wall panel is the word “Nobu”.* Kevin Scott and Barbara Kraft/Nobu Palo Alto; https://ift.tt/3DZozVi A restaurant dining room inspired by traditional Japanese architecture, such as shohji screens.* Kevin Scott and Barbara Kraft/Nobu Palo Alto; https://ift.tt/2Zaah5n A restaurant dining room inspired by traditional Japanese design, with an open glass paneled accordion door separating an outdoor area from an indoor dining area.* Kevin Scott and Barbara Kraft/Nobu Palo Alto; https://ift.tt/3pgKSlf Back-to back blue,upholstered booth seating against a tiled wall with a wood slatted ceiling.* Birdie G’s, Courtesy Montalba Architects; https://ift.tt/2XsX2vF A restaurant dining room, in which rows of tables are set against a large piece of artwork.* Montalba Architects/Birdie G’s}
In its design, the firm considers the dining experience from start to finish — and is careful not to forget the waiting areas that are inevitably needed at buzzing locations. “The dining experience begins at the arrival, and the most considerate restaurants plan for queuing through design solutions [that] support the overall aesthetic — be it by a special sitting zone where you’re pre-hosted, an area programmed with storytelling, a beautifully apportioned bench, or just intentionally crafted sidewalk elements,” Montalba says.
Montalba is prioritizing ways to bring his design philosophy into the future. For the founder, an environmentally thoughtful approach is essential; the firm has embraced efforts to curb carbon emissions by installing gravity ventilators, using stormwater in the landscaping, and recycling heat from the kitchen to regulate the dining area’s climate. Montalba Architects is currently working on a sustainably minded restaurant in Palo Alto, California, set to open in summer 2022. The design places seating areas throughout a leafy alfresco garden (hidden behind exterior walls) and removes the boundary between indoor and outdoor dining. “All pieces of the design were planned to maximize the experience of the landscape and views of the sky while inducing the feeling of being transported away from the urban city to a spiritual place,” Montalba says.
Kathryn O’Shea-Evans writes about design, travel, and food from her home base in Colorado’s Front Range.
I cut class for the first time my senior year of high school. Third period, skipped out on dance. I wasn’t doing anything cool or particularly rebellious – I was at brunch at Sweet Maple Cafe.
I first heard about the place that would become the cause of my truancy on an episode of WTTW’s Check, Please, a show where three ordinary people put forth their favorite restaurants for recommendation and the other guests visited and then weighed in on their experience. I can’t remember what exactly drew my attention to Sweet Maple, but I can assume it had something to do with the proximity to my school and a lifelong love of pancakes.
It’s been almost two decades since I graduated high school (the SAME high school, I may add, from which Michelle Obama graduated) and I no longer live in Chicago, but I return to Sweet Maple Cafe at least once a year.
The cafe is a one-room store front space on Taylor Street – a one time Italian enclave that was also home to the ABLA public homes – that is often filled with a college-brochure style cross section of races, ages, and occupations. Now called the Tri-Taylor area, the neighborhood was a mix of people who were born and raised in the neighborhood, college students, medical professionals, and everybody else.
“Unpretentious” is a loaded and overused term, especially when it comes to restaurants owned by black folks. But, owner Laurene Hynson wanted to create a space where people felt fully at home. There is an ease to the cooking, to the dining room, which is now outside due to Covid-19, that Hynson herself reflects. “I have no restaurant background at all and I kind of fell into the business.” She laughs. That was 22 years ago, so she’s clearly done something right.
{PHOTO ~ FULL | https://ift.tt/3G4ZkCz An outdoor patio with a geometric tile pattern floor. Black metal dining tables and chairs are spaced out, shielded from the sun with multi-colored umbrellas.* Lyndon French; https://ift.tt/3E03Iku A sparsely decorated room with beige walls with two street-facing windows with grid panes. The room is filled with tables placed with packaged plastic cutlery, condiments, coffee carafes, and muffins in a cake stand. The vibe is understated but welcoming.* Lyndon French; https://ift.tt/3lXwZWO An overflowing plate of scrambled eggs, country ham, an oversized golden biscuit, and a generous helping of breakfast potato wedges garnished with fresh herbs. The plate sits on a vinyl covered table cloth with paper napkins, packaged jams, and silver cutlery.* Lyndon French}
The space, during normal times, is crowded with tables covered in vinyl tablecloths in small floral patterns and checks. Wooden chairs that creak ever so slightly and scrape against whitewashed-ish floors. Servers in all black move deftly from the small kitchen that is just visible behind the counter. The walls are reminiscent of the inside of a cabin, by way of a local theater production, with black and white framed photos sprinkled across the room. “I had a picture, that actually belonged to my husband’s family, of three women who were standing in a field.” Hynson says of the inspiration of the design. “I wanted to set it, set the scene in a different time and place.” There are even maple leaves carved into the walls. The design of Sweet Maple Cafe is homey artifice, not kitsch, that would be too aggressive, but it is clearly a facsimile of the real thing.
I, like many, assumed that Hynson was paying tribute to family roots in the south, the Chicago to Mississippi or Alabama pipeline strong since the days of the Great Migration, but she is a born and bred Chicagoan, her family going back a couple of generations. It makes sense in a way, that I am drawn to this box set of black life, someone without any family to visit in the south, but roots firmly planted in Missouri. Even the photo that sparked the idea for Sweet Maple Cafe was taken in Annapolis, Maryland, not the south.
Where Sweet Maple Cafe succeeds where so many spaces fail is that it is evocative. There’s a danger in romanticizing the past, but that’s not what happens here. The faux-peeling wallpaper and the portraits hung with no clear rhyme or reason, they ask you not to imagine a gentler, sanitized version of Black life, but of home. You know you’re not in someone’s cramped kitchen or a roadside cafe in the middle of nowhere, but the little touches telegraph just enough that you get that feeling.
Like many restaurateurs, Hynson had to pivot in the past two years. She turned to the lot next door, a grassy plot that you’ll often find in Chicago where space isn’t cheap but is certainly more bountiful than it is in New York. She worked with a local artist to add color to the patio, taking a vintage linoleum pattern and blowing it up so that it looks like you are sitting on a single tile. When I went back recently to make sure my memory was still connected to reality (an activity I should probably undertake more often) the patio was filled with modern, nondescript patio furniture. But when I got up to give my four top to a family and moved with my mom to a table for two we ended up at a table with two of the wooden chairs from the dining room.
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We often come to restaurants for something outside of the food, otherwise we’d all be eating takeout in the comfort of our own home at all times. The food has to be good, don’t get me wrong. But we get dressed, get in our cars or on the train for an experience. Sometimes it is to be wowed, others to be seen, sometimes it is to feel closer to a place we miss. The local dinner, the coffee shop where the barista knows your name. Hynson wanted the space to match the comforting feeling of the food, “The feeling I want people to have is that somebody who loves them, made them breakfast.”
Food alone can’t do that. In order to feel welcome there needs to be a feeling for you to step into. A safe harbor, a refuge from the cold. Sweet Maple Cafe may excel at bacon and biscuits (my god, the sweet cream biscuits) enough to get you in the door, but the slice of life, a uniquely Chicago slice of life that keeps me coming back. It’s the chairs that remind me of my grandmother, the photos that keep me occupied during the comfortable lull in a conversation with someone I love, the windows looking out onto Taylor street, ever changing, always bustling. It is a space that holds me. It is a space that lets me know that it is okay to cobble together the pieces of joy that make a life.
Nora Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer and the deputy editor of Hodinkee.
Those gumball-pink walls. That Sunkist-orange colorblocking. Those shimmery plastic beads. You don’t even need the instantly iconic floral oilcloth tablecloths or the poster of Cindy Crawford to recognize the aesthetic that has become as much a part of Night + Market’s brand as the fried chicken sandwich or the cult French wines or the pastrami pad kee mao.
As a longtime food critic, I haven’t paid much attention to the import of restaurant design. I can appreciate the giddy grandeur of a room like Daniel in New York City, or the dreamy carved-from-the-jungle magic of the Noma pop-up in Tulum, Mexico, or the time-warp vintage beauty of Musso & Frank in Hollywood. But those are outliers: Most restaurants look like restaurants. Maybe they’re modern, maybe they have a ton of plants, maybe the materials make for a particularly soft or harsh experience. I know that color and lighting and the like can point to specific price points and types of cuisine. But unlike the food, it’s not something I instinctively think about. I force myself to think about it, to describe it, to consider its impact, but only for the sake of readers who care more than I do.
But there’s something about the look and feel of Night + Market Song in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, that felt vital, even to this design curmudgeon, from the moment I first set foot in the place when it opened in 2014. The way Night + Market looked went beyond the considerations of traditional restaurant design. There was a subversive quality to its gaudy colorblocked vibrance, its teen bedroom insistence on conveying an actual personality — a human life with multifaceted influences. It revealed far more about the person responsible — chef and owner Kris Yenbamroong — than just what he thought a restaurant should look like. “It’s not really the way a restaurant is supposed to look,” Yenbamroong says.
Much like his food, the design of Song felt like Yenbamroong daring people to try to put him in a box and then rejecting that box. As a professional observer of food culture, I was more excited by that rejection than even the most well-considered or flamboyant design. And yet, it’s not an aesthetic that was conjured by a design firm or really thought out in any formal way.
{IMAGE ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3EdLRXJ A table with a kitschy, floral table cloth set with plain white plates, silver cutlery, and two amber-colored plastic cups. The table is next to a plastic bead curtain, and the walls are bright pink.* Elizabeth Daniels}
In 2014, America was deep in the throes of a food revolution. Chefs everywhere were finally cooking exactly what they wanted to eat rather than what they thought they were supposed to cook, or what traditionally had sold well, or what was expected. It was a revolution led by chefs like David Chang in New York, by restaurants like Animal in Los Angeles. But even though the soundtracks in those restaurants often mimicked the “this is what we like, deal with it” ethos of the menus — the music was loud and fun and often countercultural — the restaurants themselves looked like, well, restaurants. Sometimes they were sparse in a way that might be considered daring, but unlike the food and the music, the design of these places rarely conveyed much other than a rejection of the stuffiness (and tablecloths) of the fine dining of the past. It was different, yes, but it didn’t offer much in the way of newness or give me anything to grab hold of as a signifier of forward motion.
Night + Market Song was the first restaurant I encountered that took that “I do what I want” ethos and fully applied it to design. Stepping into the place felt like entering someone else’s vividly colored consciousness. It has often been compared to a teenager’s bedroom, mainly because of the Cindy Crawford poster, but that comparison works for me for a different reason. Do you remember the first time you entered the bedroom of a new friend in high school, someone who had worked hard to create an almost theatrical space for themselves — maybe it was incense and posters, maybe it was crushed velvet curtains, maybe it just exuded weed and sex — and you knew immediately that you had just glimpsed into the psyche of that person and liked them even more? Night + Market Song was like that for me. That the food backed up this raucous, cross-cultural explosion of personality only added to the effect.
Yenbamroong’s background as a photographer and all-round art nerd helped make for a restaurant that was as visually stimulating as it was stimulating to the palate, but its design was also the result of multiple cultural influences — it came from a Thai kid who grew up in LA, who had snippets of Thailand etched into his mind from an early age but who also loved American pop culture, who spent time in London and New York, and who felt he had nothing to prove to anyone in terms of the authenticity of his own food or experiences.
“Even the idea that it was designed is a little off,” Yenbamroong says. “I mean, I guess you could say it was a design process, but it’s more like sitting on a couch in your therapist’s office and stuff just coming out.”
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3jm1d4m Another view of the restaurant, multiple tables set with plastic floral table clothes, the room is divided by a plastic beaded curtain.* Elizabeth Daniels}
Yenbamroong and his partner (and now wife) Sarah St. Lifer painted the place themselves. The colorblocking was an idea that Yenbamroong had encountered on a photo shoot years earlier in a kitchen in New York City that had been painted in a French style with wide swaths of white and blue. He wondered what that might look like if he used the vibrant colors seen in Thai advertisements and billboards.
“I spent a good chunk of my formative years in Thailand, but I wasn’t trying to create something from there,” Yenbamroong says. “Or maybe I was, but more like my memory of it rather than the real thing. When you experience something when you’re younger, it’s not rigorous or academic. You touch it and feel it and then you go away from it and don’t see it for a while, you have some skewed hazy memory of it. It was the colors, and how when you walk around, the advertisements look a certain way.”
The fit-out was also done with whatever materials they could afford, which wasn’t much. “It wasn’t like, how should I do it?” he says. “It was more like, what can I cobble together?”
Were the chairs comfortable? Was it a pleasant place to dine? Not really, but it barely mattered. You always had to wait for a table, and the atmosphere was always on the verge of chaos. It felt like a party. The community and the restaurant kind of blended together. If you wanted an accurate picture of the soul of Silver Lake in the mid-2010s, Night + Market Song was a good place to start.
Song was Yenbamroong’s second restaurant, but even so — partially because of its design — he thinks of it as the flagship. “That’s kind of the one that has come to define what a Night + Market restaurant looks like,” he says. “It’s also the one that maybe provides inspiration for people. People send me photos of places around the world that look like it.”
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Garrett Snyder, who was the first food writer to cover the original Night + Market and co-wrote the Night + Market cookbook, says that Song is the place where Yenbamroong came into his own. “He had become much more confident in his personal aesthetic,” Snyder says. “He knew what he wanted to evoke in a way that he didn’t when he first started. He didn’t feel the need to explain the ‘Thai-ness’ of what he was doing. At that time, there were still observers who saw Night + Market as this attempt at obscure hyper-regional authenticity instead of being a uniquely personal expression. Song really cemented that he was doing something different. It’s that confidence in his own taste and sensibility that defines him most as a chef and artist.”
Several years after Song’s debut, in a different city — and now a husband and father — Yenbamroong’s experience designing the newest Night + Market restaurant has been vastly different. “It was like, in your wildest fantasy, what do you want it to be?” he says. “It wasn’t like I had an unlimited amount of money… but it was a lot of money. And it wasn’t my money.” For Night + Market Vegas in Virgin Casino, Yenbamroong worked with Ashley Justman from Avenue Interior Design. Rather than try to re-create a carbon copy Night + Market restaurant, they amplified the glam of Vegas while also reviving some ideas that Yenbamroong had originally had in mind for the Venice, California, restaurant that opened in 2018. “When we opened the restaurant in Venice, I had this idea that it be kind of cocaine Thai,” Yenbamroong says. “Not that I want people doing drugs in the restaurant, but I felt that there was a lack of fun and excess at that time.” In the end, that inspiration made its way into the over-the-top restaurant in Vegas, which has a chrome ceiling and a wall of disco balls. “Every one of my restaurants has one disco ball,” Yenbamroong says. “Vegas has like 50 disco balls.”
Talking to him about it, I get that sense again that he’s daring people to try to keep him in some kind of box. The kid who started his first restaurant as a bizarre art project, who painted his second restaurant himself, is now a man in his late 30s with a wife and child, and if he wants a Vegas restaurant with a chrome ceiling stuffed full of disco balls, who says he shouldn’t do that, too? If all restaurant design was like that — if it truly represented the different eras and obsessions and cultures of the human behind the business — well, maybe I’d be much more interested in restaurant design.
Despite the collaboration and inflated budget and extreme fun of the Vegas project, Yenbamroong’s heart is still with Song. “At the end of the day, if I just had one restaurant, if I just had Song again, and I’m like 40 years old, and I just had my wife and kids, and I could just run Song and, like, actually be in the kitchen? A lot? I’d be happy with that.
“2014 feels like forever ago,” he adds. “I could never do that today.”
We all grow up and leave our teenage bedrooms behind. We don’t design our houses or restaurants as if they are supposed to tell the world something about our souls; we are more caught up in trends and good taste and showcasing our levels of wealth and consumerism. But money can’t buy the kind of brilliance exhibited in an arty kid’s bedroom, and it probably can’t buy the level of freshness and originality and fun that Yenbamroong came up with back when Song opened. That, likely, is exactly what makes it so special.
Besha Rodell is a restaurant critic and columnist for the New York Times Australia bureau and T Magazine Australia. She is a James Beard Award winner and was formerly the lead restaurant critic at LA Weekly.
Sometimes a particular hour and place overlap in a way that feels as if you’ve entered a portal from ordinary life into something more capable of magic. Maybe you’ve encountered it in an empty school after hours or a lamp-lit street devoid of all traffic, on playgrounds or the beach at midnight or the hallways of a Cineplex during screenings. When emptied of people, places that typically hold crowds feel as conjured as the worlds your mind moves through while reading a work of fiction — and just as yours to explore. It’s rare to find a place that doesn’t require trespassing to replicate that feeling. Yet Pailin Thai Cuisine in Los Angeles is such a place.
Pailin holds the romance of somewhere secret or abandoned, but it holds it during regular operating hours.
In the modest rectangle that is Pailin, all of the half dozen or so tables are pushed against the walls. A mirror runs along the right wall, and a dazzling collection of bright trinkets are pinned to the left. There are classical paintings of decorated generals. And there are bright metal fish and birds that bloom silver between intricate gold altars on red and cream walls. All together, the tiny interior with its maximalist Old World decor appeals to the part of me that wishes I could spend my life inside a jeweled egg.
You can slide deep into the blue vinyl booths until you’re tucked against one of the spangled walls. Down the empty aisle in the middle of the restaurant, waiters will bring you steaming bowls of khao soi or plates of glistening fried rice. Seated anywhere, you have a view of the entire place, right down to the kitchen doors at the back from which your order will emerge. The footfall of the staff, the hiss of hot dishes, and the clinking of silverware are all muffled by dark navy patterned carpeting. It’s the kind found in movie theater lobbies, and here, too, it evokes a sense of casual time travel by being a setting far removed from everything outside it.
Pailin is the only place I’ve ever sat comfortably with my back to a door. The loud colors and even louder music at the more popular Night + Market Song make that restaurant a punishing experience despite the tastiness of the food. The long wait times and chaotic seating at the wonderful Jitlada make it best for to-go orders. But Pailin is always perfect.
{PHOTO ~ FULL | https://ift.tt/3jjFf1N An overhead view of a bowl of opaque yellow broth, oily bubbles are visible and the dish is garnished with crispy wonton slices and fresh cilantro leaves.* Jakob Layman; https://ift.tt/3lWsgoj A side view of the inside of a restaurant facing a register stand. There are half booths wrapped in vinyl, with wooden tables and chairs. The walls are decorated with mismatched antique looking art featuring elephant motifs.* Jakob Layman}
Pailin offers a respite from the part of Los Angeles that vibrates with the anxieties of its residents. In LA, you can dine among bored executives scarfing down $30 burgers they’ll expense, agents courting clients whose eager smiles don’t release even once during the entire meal, and 22-year-old influencers with straws hanging from their mouths who leave bread baskets untouched. All of them can be caught scanning their surroundings every few minutes to see who else is there and what that means for the status of the establishment and, subsequently, themselves.
I don’t have anything against them, but they’re not who I want to eat with. Theirs are not the conversations I want leaking over to my table. I don’t want an air of transaction at a place of rest, and I don’t want to see outfits so on trend they carry an expiration date. Pailin is for people who are not still pursuing something even while they’re sitting down. In fact, there are rarely many others there at all.
The stillness Pailin attracts is inherent to its style. It has no seasonal menu items or elaborately garnished cocktails. There’s very little to even indicate what decade you’re in. The place is as small and self-contained as a music box, which makes it feel entirely untethered to the city outside it. The restaurant has the ambience of the bear’s living room on a box of Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime tea. The result is a place where your attention rests exactly where you are.
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No wonder Pailin draws people who have already achieved some constancy in their lives. I have only ever seen couples eating there. And only a very specific type of couple. They always sit side by side — not across from each other. Rather than being awkward, their closeness registers as natural, making the more conventional arrangement seem confrontational in comparison. These couples eat quietly, unselfconsciously. Their silences are the peaceful ease of people who have nothing to prove to each other and want nothing from anyone else.
Once, I spotted a man and woman who I guessed were joining each other after their workday. They sat side by side against the left wall and faced the center of the restaurant. His shirt was a little crumpled, her hair was slipping out of her ponytail. For two people, they had ordered a feast. Before them were heaps of spicy shredded papaya salad and peanut-garnished pad thai, little bowls of warm white rice surrounding bigger bowls of rich yellow curry. They ate with leisure, neither fast nor slow. Within that little restaurant existed an even smaller world only they inhabited and in which only one thing was occurring: a satisfying meal.
Eating at a restaurant is vulnerable in the same way any surrender of control is. You have to trust what you’re being served. You’re subject to someone else’s idea of a comfortable environment. Core needs are left in another’s hands, and regardless of what you ask for, how it arrives isn’t up to you. It mimics the surrender required in relationships.
At best, these small surrenders are what make both dining out and romantic partnership a relieving experience. It’s part of why Pailin is more a “relationship restaurant” than “date restaurant.” The lighting isn’t dimmed to flatter any agendas. There are no nervous pairs making a dozen separate calculations in their heads as they rush through a meal. Pailin rewards confidence in who you’re with and where you’re choosing to be. And like a good relationship, the little worlds within worlds that are possible in Pailin allow for a suspension of vigilance but the security of containment, a matryoshka doll effect of one’s own conjuring, available to the discerning who seek enchantment in everyday life.
If you’ve ever wished you could mute the world, or at the very least escape its dissonant background, come to Pailin. There is peace, a pause, a rate of time unique to a smaller square-foot radius. At least for as long as it takes to enjoy a hot bowl of something delicious, you can live in a world containing only your table and the warmth it offers.
Ayesha A. Siddiqi is editor-in-chief of The New Inquiry and writes on trends, culture, and media.
From 2014 to 2016, on my days off from working as a cheesemaker at a small production facility near the Somerville-Cambridge line, I’d walk 15 minutes from my apartment to a nondescript corner of Technology Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After descending a small staircase, I’d be met with a familiar sight: a bar awash in the orange-red neon of vintage liquor signs, a sturdy jukebox containing a mix of hit songs from different genres, a pool table, and pinball machines. I had entered the world of State Park, and for a couple of hours, over boilermakers, playful cocktails, and Southern food like fried chicken with collard greens, I could relax and forget that I wasn’t sure where I was going or how I would get there.
In those days, in addition to working as a cheesemaker, I took odd jobs and wrote freelance articles on the side, hoping to one day land an assignment at a magazine or newspaper. I also spent countless hours sitting at State Park’s laminated wooden tables with a pitcher of drinks, talking to friends about their goals and discussing our love lives. Once (and most regrettably), I perched at one of those tables lecturing friends about how the world needed each of us “to find our purpose,” encouraging them to crystalize their goals while unsure about my own. Fueled by insecurity, I was projecting. I was reaching for a soft place to land and only feeling more unmoored. But in the warped reality of State Park, I could eat delicious beer cheese, have a shot of rye, and pretend I was somewhere where it didn’t feel as if my dream of becoming a food writer was losing steam — at least until last call.
{PHOTO ~ HALF-RIGHT | https://ift.tt/3pkjPoZ A wide-angle view of an outdoor dining area. Slatted wooded tables are arranged with blue metal chairs. Above the tables are angularly-cut wooden shades held up by black metal braces.* Drew Katz}
Opened in 2013, State Park is the brainchild of chefs Tyler Sundet, Rachel Miller Munzer, and Barry Maiden, who is best known as the chef of Southern-inspired fine dining restaurant Hungry Mother. That restaurant is closed now, but it racked up accolades and awards during its seven-year run, including a Best Chef: Northeast win for Maiden from the James Beard Foundation. Both restaurants are named after one place: Hungry Mother State Park in Virginia, near the craggy, jagged edge of the state that touches Kentucky, West Virginia, and North Carolina. But while Hungry Mother channeled the South via fine dining versions of Southern dishes, State Park uses both menu and design to take you on a comforting, temporary trip to the region, which for me at the time felt like a respite from the uncertainty of my life in the northeast.
The use of dive bar aesthetics can be garish and gimmicky, but at State Park, it’s done with gentle admiration and humor. State Park is not a dive bar in the traditional sense, where time and grunginess are part of the charm; it’s a dive bar in appearance. The wood paneling on the walls, the back bar of whiskeys, and the neon-lit Budweiser sign are there to make you feel as if you’re in a basement south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The occasional crack of billiard balls crashing into each other punctuates a playlist that ventures from rock to hip-hop to country. Bags of Zapp’s chips hang next to the bar, available for purchase. All of the elements, including the design, are treated with respect. It feels as if you’ve wandered into the nicest bar in rural Virginia until you hear a Boston accent coming from a nearby table.
And unlike most true dive bars, State Park has the kitchen of a neighborhood restaurant, serving dependable options like crispy Brussels sprouts and glazed pork belly. Yes, you’re still in Massachusetts, but you’re also in a space where collard greens are stewed tender and slicked with duck fat and where funfetti cake is made by a talented pastry chef who understands there’s nothing lowbrow about the balance of textures in a slice of cake.
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When State Park opened, I was happy to have an inexpensive place where I could eat pickled okra and andouille and share pitchers of cocktails with friends late into the night. But as my time in Boston continued, it also became a place where I didn’t have to think about having any kind of grand plan for the future. The best bars are ones where you can lose track of time, and State Park did that, but its decor and ambiance, rooted in someplace else, also made it feel like it was nowhere, like it existed in a different universe all together. I could be absorbed into the black hole of a dive bar for a few hours and come out comforted by chef Sundet’s dishes, feeling stabilized by the experience because it allowed me to be elsewhere, even if only mentally, for a bit. The warmth of the space made the harsh reality of a snowy, cold locale more bearable.
Maiden stepped away from Hungry Mother and State Park in 2015, and Sundet and Munzer have gone on to open other concepts, including Vincent’s in the former Hungry Mother space, and have expanded the menu at State Park to include different options that aren’t solely Southern. And thanks to the pandemic, those meals are now available to be enjoyed on a patio in front of the restaurant. But when I think about State Park, I think of being subterranean and my time in Cambridge, including when I said goodbye to friends in 2016 after deciding to move to try to be a full-time writer elsewhere.
That evening, while playing shuffleboard in a corner, the bartender brought us two shots of whiskey on the house after hearing that my then-fiance and I would be hitting the road for a month before settling down in another city, where I hoped to make connections and be inspired by a different environment. After enjoying the shots, we headed out of the space and up the steps, before making one last walk back to our apartment. It was time to leave the embrace of State Park for a new reality.
Korsha Wilson is a New Jersey-based food writer host of A Hungry Society, a podcast that takes a more inclusive look at the food world.
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