Foreword
American restaurants and their architecture have changed a lot since 1990 when Danny Meyer asked us to modify a service station at his Union Square Café. In the following years, young restaurateurs in New York City, as in other major metropolitan areas, opened fine dining places with an emphasis on quality and value in service and cuisine rather than obeisance to a grand tradition. These new restaurants were rooted in their locales by virtue of their service to local patrons, their use of regionally sourced food, their connections to neighborhoods, and their association with emerging culinary and restaurant cultures of their cities. Places such as Union Square Café gained increasing prominence, critical acclaim and, most important, popularity. This was a change we experienced firsthand as restaurant patrons. But it was not until we had the opportunity to design such spaces that we became fully aware of the implications for their design. Change that was advantageous for the dining public turned out to be equally so for us, since it was consistent with our goals for our work. Contemporary, communal, regional, and artisanal were — and still are — hallmarks of our architecture. To the rising sensibility of up-and-coming purveyors of hospitality we brought our own passions for identification with place, material authenticity, craft, simple forms, and a compositional aesthetic that unifies every feature of a project, from the largest scale to the smallest. Physical architecture is not the only salient feature of restaurants. Nor are restaurants only about the food or the service. Rather, they are about a broader experience of hospitality, that form of personal and professional conduct that binds all aspects of a restaurant together, from hello to goodbye and everything in between. Through our work, we have come to understand the relationship between all the elements that together constitute a great restaurant and our contribution as architects. The architectural quality of restaurants resides in the careful composition of essential components, carefully orchestrated and tuned to support the social activity of “dining out” and the cultural practices associated with preparing, serving, and enjoying food. Our initial sense of what makes a dining experience special was not forged out of a reaction against the restaurant world that existed before. Instead we derived it from our personal family culture. Whether by birth or marriage, we are the children of architects trained as modernists and the grandchildren of craftspeople, many of whom were foreign-born and non-native English speakers. So we were twice estranged from popular culture — first, out of the respect for the avant-garde we acquired from our parents and second, out of the insularity of our family’s foreign
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