Market by Jean-Georges Boston, Massachusetts
Situated at the base of a glass-enveloped tower in Boston's theater district, Market by Jean-Georges was conceived as a three-meal restaurant within the W Hotel. The restrained design of the restaurant itself reflects both the culinary philosophy of the chef and a New England ethic that prizes simplicity, directness, and the elegant orchestration of these qualities. The restaurant space is blessed with two adjacent full-height glass walls, fronting on a prominent intersection, offering abundant natural light by day and merging at night into a luminous theater-street scene. Drapery with a carefully calibrated transparency captures enough light, day or night, to yield a subtle glow. The restaurant's signature design feature is a broad canopy of bleached oak, set against a darker background, lending the dining room a sense of enclosure while framing it when seen from outside in the manner of a proscenium. Suspended lighting fixtures discreetly lower the scale of this space for diners. Two ancillary dining alcoves are defined by vertically oriented screens in the same bleached oak. The materials throughout have been chosen to evoke New England beaches, where nature and culture meet harmoniously — as they do in fine food preparation. The architects saw the combination of light woods against dark as comparable to that of driftwood, bleached on the surface and darker at the core. Mussel shells inspired the use of blackened steel and polished stainless. The bright white of the leather banquettes was seen as recalling sea foam, hovering above the earthy browns and grays of the porcelain tile floor. An adjacent private dining room displays the same materials and colors at a more intimate scale. The restaurant's bar is not in the usual position, just inside the restaurant's entry, but placed at the far end of the space. Its location and intimacy separates it effectively from another bar adjoining the hotel's lobby. And it was designed to incorporate a raw shellfish bar, further distinguishing it as a regionally evocative destination for food as well as drink.
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