North End Grill New York, New York
Located in Battery Park City on the Lower Manhattan waterfront, North End Grill is a re-imagined version of the traditional American bar and grill. The original chef with whom the kitchen was designed used charcoal grilling techniques he learned from both Spain and India to highlight the flavors of the carefully sourced seasonal ingredients, with a stress on seafood. The design takes its cue from this simple and direct method of cooking. To emphasize the process of preparing the food, the plan ensures that all guests have a view into the open kitchen to see cooking taking place at the custom-designed grills. The almost 175-feet-long street frontage of the restaurant’s 8,500-square-foot space is interrupted by a pair of utility rooms for the base building, which effectively divide its length into two distinct parts. Moreover, the space has very little depth, so that back-of- house food-related functions that would typically be tucked far from the guests’ view had to be situated in areas that diners would also need to occupy or walk through. These space limitations provided the impetus for a plan that enhances the guest’s experience, rather than detracting from it. In the design, the long journey from the initial greeting at the door to one’s seat in the dining room is enlivened by the opportunities en route to see, hear, and smell the grilling of food in the open kitchen from a dining counter directly adjoining it, to walk between the activities at the seafood and pastry stations, and to select a bottle from the glass-fronted wine room before arriving at one’s table. While the design maximizes views from the dining room towards the nearby Hudson River, it also allows diners to enjoy views back towards the lively kitchen and food preparation areas through which they have passed. The material palette — cleft black slate, honed white marble, ebonized white oak, weathered gray pine, and waxed blackened steel — refers to the simplicity of the method of cooking in general and to the charcoal and the food that is grilled over it in particular. For instance, to reinforce the relationship between the architecture and the method by which the chef cooks, the rear wall of the dining room is made of charred poplar planks that are raked with light to accentuate their texture and color.
190
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online