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New restaurants for all eyes, all hours
BY CLAIR ENLOW The gulls, the Gortex and the small-town smiles tell you you're still in Seattle. But at dinner time in Belltown or on Sixth Avenue, there can be no mistake. You're in a real city. There are people on the street at 8 p.m., and when you cross the threshold of a new restaurant, you might as well be in L.A., Chicago or New York.
Sophisticated food and impeccable service are only the beginning. Before you ever see the menu, architecture has helped you choose. Using everything from rigorous restraint to theatrical display, architects and interior designers from Seattle and from out-of-town are redefining the experience of eating out.
From Belltown to the convention center, most of the new restaurants are fitted into the typical urban storefront space, with a long, narrow floor plate and one or two outside walls. Interior walls are an important design focus, with lighting, color and pattern providing ambiance and entertainment. Surfaces are worked with tile and special finishes. Art and custom fabrications play starring roles.
And so do the patrons. Seeing and being seen is part of the experience, and restaurant designers are rising to the occasion.
Cooking is part of the show. A common assumption among the newest restaurants is that cooking is a performance to be shared. Displays of fresh food or views into the kitchen are almost ubiquitous.
"People want to know their food is fresh," said architect Skip Downing, "and they believe it if they see it prepared."
Skip Downing
Downing, designer of Blowfish restaurant in the Paramount Hotel, began designing restaurants in the era of the Seattle World's Fair. Credentialed as an architect, an interior designer and a kitchen designer, his experience ranges from franchise hamburger restaurants to urbane nightspots.
"In all my years since 1962, I have never, ever seen it like it is right now," he said, noting that he's had to say no to enviable commissions.
Although Downing's work defies niche labels, "I'm kind of known for laying out tough spaces," he said.
Blowfish, for instance, is shoehorned into a space 12 feet wide and 50 feet long on the ground floor of the Paramount Hotel.
Dimensions aside, "The menu really does a lot to determine how a restaurant should work," said Downing. If it works right, when the food arrives at the table, "You get what you expect."
He responded to Blowfish's cross-Asian menu with an eclectic assemblage of materials, images and objects that combine classic culture with popular entertainment and images.
"It's meant to be an Asian restaurant through an American's eyes," said Downing, "but no dragons and fu dogs."
Instead, the walls of Blowfish are hung with Japanese cartoons and lined with pachinko machines. A giant bronze blowfish greets diners at the entrance and a whimsical tile sculpture brightens the back room.
Downing took advantage of the ceiling height in the narrow restaurant. Steel origami birds are hung from the suspended ceiling and are "painted every color I could think of." Powerful exhaust fans -- which intake and exhaust air right over the heads of diners because there was no place to take pipes to the outside -- cause suspended origami sculptures to move in mysterious ways. "Every once in a while, designers do luck out," said Downing.
Geographic or historic themes go with the territory in restaurant design. But most lean away from being camp and rely on a few essential elements or metaphors to evoke a sense of time and place.
Jeff Stuhr
With its rainy climate, Portland is also a promising market for tropical themes.
At Oba, which opens in Portland's historic Pearl District this week, Jeff Stuhr of Holst Architecture has taken an urban design idea -- a South American city -- and put it into a building.
"That's where we started the dialogue with our client," said Stuhr.
The bar at Oba, roughly speaking, is a basilica. The plaza itself is the heart of the project.
"We are not being literal when we do this," he said.
To describe his approach to Oba, Stuhr uses the words "magical realism" -- a Latin American literary term.
"It's a very vibrant, exciting place," he said.
In addition to his architecture education, Stuhr uses his background as a waiter and a chef to design restaurants.
The dominant colors are those of tropical fruit. There is a lot of metal work in custom candle and light fixtures, he said, but some of the industrial rawness of the original space is still present.
Stuhr used these devices, and a lot of candlelight, to "layer in a bit of decadence." Another metaphor for Oba: "Fruit goes from that point of being ripe to a little overripe."
He expects the vibrant, sensual ambience of Oba to go a long way to "transport people out of Portland" and counteract the "long, gray seasons here."
Bob Puccini
Seattle's Sazerac, the new restaurant attached to The Kimpton Group's Hotel Monaco, nearly leaps from its gray outer walls to invite passersby to sit awhile. From initial concept through design, it is the creation of San Francisco restaurant designer Bob Puccini, who now runs a restaurant division at Kimpton.
"I see restaurants going through a renaissance, not new growth," he said.
When it comes to using fresh food and local ingredients, "even 20 years ago Seattle was a very innovative city," he said. Now there is not only a business center, but cultural and residential centers are emerging downtown, so kitchen competition is heating up.
"Lately, there has been a tendency to watch what your neighbor is doing, and then up the ante," he said, "like in the other great cites of America."
In Seattle, Puccini had to contend with an "ante" upped by his own creations when he set out to help Sazerac stand out.
Conveniently, Sazerac actually had to come out into the sidewalk to meet city setback requirements. Puccini capitalized on that requirement with sculptural, copper signage that fairly dances around the corner of the concrete hotel building. The result is "fun combined with quality," he said. To walk inside is to "have a sense of entering a different kind of reality."
At Sazerac, references to the South are indirect but clear -- not only in the name, but in the a certain homeyness combined with unabashed opulence.
Tables are lit with pools of light. Velvet curtains between booths fall upon simple, stained concrete floors. The menu exudes Southern influence "in the greater regional sense," according to Puccini, and the design lets you know, "We're here to take care of you."
Bob Mesher
Seattle's Mesher/Shing Associates has been upping the ante on the restaurant scene for years. Whether the project is a family cafe or a five-star dinner house, the firm designs enormous richness and atmospheric impact into restaurants.
At Briazz, a lunch spot on Fifth Avenue specializing in take-out, gourmet food, Mesher pulled out all the stops, packing a high-tech "power wall" with shelves of tempting food to pick up and carry.
According to Mesher, the wall says, "I'm fresh, I taste good. It's really a merchandising approach."
If the diner chooses to eat in, she can sit in front of a wall splashed with layers of pattern and color.
Despite the economic upswing, value remains a very important element, Mesher said. The customer has to leave thinking the food tasted good, she had a good time, and she'll be back more than once a month, according to Mesher.
Barbara Lazaroff Barbara Lazaroff, designer of ObaChine and Wolfgang Puck Cafe in Seattle, flies around the world orchestrating and tuning the atmosphere for each new addition to the rapidly expanding restaurant empire of her husband and business partner, Wolfgang Puck. Despite the burgeoning work and grueling schedule, her personal creative attachment to each one is apparent.
When Lazaroff started designing for this series of restaurants four years ago, she began with an exhibition kitchen called the tile box that is tiled from floor to ceiling. "You can hose the whole thing down," she said.
Compared to the ethereal atmosphere of Puck's ObaChine restaurants, such as the one that opened last year on Sixth Avenue, the Wolfgang Puck Cafes seem to reach out to the street.
Broken tile glazed in bright red and other hot colors dominates the interior, and glass art objects complete the scene. This is a Wolfgang Puck Cafe calmed down for the local market.
In Seattle, "We decided to tone the restaurant down with textiles." Lazaroff noted, however, that "if there was ever a place that deserves an exuberant color palette, this is it."
Arellano/Christophides Seattle's Arellano/Christophides entered the restaurant design field only in the last three years, and is not planning to take over the market.
Arellano and Christophides are life-long Seattleites, and their rigorous, architectural approach to design fits Seattle's reserved sophistication.
Christophides describes design as "a process of reduction rather than addition."
Solid blocks of painstakingly chosen color reflect warmth and coolness from the high walls of Flying Fish. Tables on two levels offer a range of seating options and expansive interior or exterior views. An open kitchen and a family-style, pan-Asian menu combine comfortably with the urbane interior and a certain economy-of-means that fits the region well.
From neighborhood restaurant to downtown nightspot, everything that goes into their design "must make for a better mood or a better experience," said Arellano. "Lighting is at the top of the list."
But here, too is a certain austerity, a decision not to "put bright objects around."
"Custom light fixtures cost $1,000 each," said Christophides, "but I couldn't say that the quality of light brought to the table is better."
"It's not just in the eyes. It's in the mood," said Arellano.
The mood is magically heightened at El Gaucho, a longstanding Seattle restaurant which has been relocated and recreated in the old Seaman's Hall.
To prepare for the project, Arellano and Christophides watched old movies from the 1940s and 1950s, looking for cues about mood, space and behavior.
The result is a subtle but dramatic space, where circulating, standing and even just sitting are all ways to participate in the architecture. Changing floor levels and ramps are lit from the floor, and seating might be in sunken booths or on rounded, raised platforms.
"You have your choice whether to be an actor or the audience," said Christophides.
The blues and purples of the palette and the padding on the bar recall smoky lounges of the past.
It's "almost campy," he said.
Despite luxurious touches for patrons such as having their own, rentable on-site humidors, the El Gaucho was built within a tight budget.
"I don't know what I would do if someone gave us a million dollars," said Christophides. "Hopefully, I'll find out.
At the same time, the two would like to keep their restaurant design work to a very manageable pace.
"It's very rewarding," said Christophides. "We don't want it to become work. " After all, "You can only have so many ideas in a given year."
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