Introduction
Architects designing restaurants design objects as small as a spoon, as intimate as two chairs and table and as large and public as a banquet room for hundreds. This range reflects the special nature of the restaurant program. Simultaneously places of work and leisure, restaurants cater to the quotidian and the special event. Organized internally around their service, they connect with regional resources for food supplies, staff and cultural relevancy. While processing tons of raw food and dispersing waste, restaurants support the most refined and acculturated social practices. The contrasts evident in the program of a restaurant are not black and white, but rather finely graded. Between big and small, intimate and public, formal and informal, unprocessed and fully finished, there is a spectrum of things to design. Like nesting eggs, the spoon sits on the table served by the chair within the room of a building that is itself located in the city that draws upon a region. Restaurant architecture reflects that layered complexity. The design of restaurants is at once an exercise in differentiation — the segregation of program parts by function, space needs and character — and one of synthesis as we and the cohort of owners, restaurateurs, and chefs, as well as engineers, equipment designers and restaurant personnel strive to achieve a unity of concept and execution. As architects of restaurants, we dwell on the particular and local, seeking threads of information about the place and purpose of the restaurant with the expectation that they will reappear, woven into the fabric of the design. We investigate, analyze, reflect, propose, test, prototype, reflect again, re-propose and compose with all of the artistic imperatives of achieving a composition that is more than the sum of the parts. That is why our work is varied, each project bound to a specific time and place but linked by a common method of inquiry and resolution of use, material, technique, light, form and space. Restaurants, especially the urban restaurants that are primarily the subject of our work, are also social venues, places where communities of people gather. Restaurants not only serve their dining patrons. They can also anchor the communities around them as parts of a civic landscape, as neighborhood landmarks as well as rooted business enterprises and places of employment. Urban anthropologists recognize this attribute of restaurants when they interpret dining establishments of all stripes — the historical taverns, inns, bars of the past, as well as the diners, coffee shops, pizzerias of today and all of the cultural, ethnic, regional and national permutations of the restaurant — as the markers of urban neighborhoods. Evidence of this is provided by the most successful restaurants in New York City, including the "destination" restaurants that
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