Intimate Immensity
My, what big restaurants you have! Ted Gachot looks over the anatomy of the new mega-restaurant.
Ted Gachot reports.
"Daydream feeds on all kinds of sights," observes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space from which this portfolio of unusually large restaurants borrows its title, "but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur."
Judging by the colossal dining spots that have sprung up in the past year or so, it's an even grander sort of grandeur than ever before. We've entered an era of elephantine eating establishments, requiring fistfuls of millions in investment, occupying tens of thousands of square feet, accommodating hundreds of patrons, and generally courting the notion of big—big food, big names, big checks, big deal—in manifestations that range from the grand and the sublime to the tumescent and merely hulking.
There have, of course, been large restaurants before, generally in boom times. And if times aren't bad, they're not pre–Black Monday or tech bubble good either. Yet these new behemoths (freestanding restaurants seating 200 to 400) are bigger than almost anything that has ever before left behind a footprint.
Could it simply be that, acclimatized to shopping at Wal-Mart, Costco, and Home Depot, Americans are now only comfortable opening their wallets in spaces that might house a dirigible?
Possibly. But matters as prosaic as good deals on white elephant real estate may also play a role. Philadelphia-based restaurant developer Stephen Starr has suggested that the risk factor in opening large-scale Manhattan outposts of his restaurants Buddakan and Morimoto—in an ex-lumberyard and loading dock, respectively—was at least reduced by signing a bargain-basement lease.
Still, he insists that "Overall, the space inspires me, not the square footage. I choose restaurant locations based on the feeling of the space, the feng shui of how I feel when I walk into that space. The two New York City locations just felt great."
Certainly one reason restaurants are bigger is that they are no longer just restaurants. They are also bars or tapas bars or sushi bars or sometimes even more than one restaurant under a single roof. They are nightclubs, party spaces, banquet facilities, private rooms, but above all they are lounges. Among the new giants, the lion's share sets its sights on the youngish hip urbanite on the prowl. This creature's not unprofitable predilection for nibbling small dishes while imbibing alcoholic beverages in a suitable setting has spurred a widespread "lounging" of restaurants, which these days overshadow nightclubs or mere bars as the preferred destination.
The trope of the "big" entered the vernacular of hip back in the mid-1990s when Philippe Starck began to incorporate outsized elements into his designs for the Ian Schrager hotels. The original intent was a surreal jolt of disproportion, but the trope stuck and spun off design features such as the conspicuous staircase, the massive light fixture or light/glass/water effect, and, perhaps most incongruously, the colossal Buddha—while the spaces themselves grew to meet the scale of these elements. Together with other pervasive emblems of cool, such as podlike seating and polymorphic delectation of the unlikely hybrid, these tropes have formed an ad-hoc language of "hipitecture," which at a glance signals that one has indeed found a spot where metrosexuals gather before they spawn.
Again, not the whole story. It's also tempting and probably not altogether wrong to sense in this super-sizing of the dining experience something of the paw print of empire. A tinge, in the age of Hummers and McMansions, of the sole extra-super-jumbo power reflecting on its own vastness. And perhaps some good old-fashioned hubris as well. But also a sense of adventure and risk-taking, of Everests to be climbed.
Asked about that risk, Starr replied, "There's always a risk in keeping a restaurant full, but that's where our expertise comes in." And he added, "It's very difficult to achieve the financial reward with a smaller restaurant."
Yet, he continued, "I definitely think there's something about large restaurants that's attractive to diners. If you're looking for a special night out, a large restaurant helps to achieve that by providing sexy atmosphere, great energy, and the opportunity to feel like you're escaping reality. People want variety; there's a need for both small intimate restaurants that feel as if they've been around forever, and there's also a need for larger, more dramatic and theatrical spaces that make people feel special."
One need only flutter open the paper to experience the downside of a monolithic culture; these really big shows may, most simply, be attempts to dream the positive side of big.
Buddha-Bar New York When Buddha-Bar Paris opened in 1997, it defined a new and influential paradigm of high-tone hip by cannily combining film noir with Far Eastern decor; Asian takeout reconceived through the rarefied senses of a delirious Frenchman; and the sounds of a DJ spinning up-to-the-minute hypnotically postcolonial mixes of world and house music—all in a space overseen by a colossal gold-leafed Buddha. The appropriation of a sacred image as the mascot of pleasure-seeking nightlife may or may not have been a deliberate attempt to add a dose of profane piquancy to the mix. But "le mix," an all-embracing urbane eclecticism, is exactly what Buddha-Bar—known for the compilation CDs of musical mixes put out by its DJs as much as anything else—gave widespread cultural currency. A club that served dinner in its original incarnation, Buddha-Bar New York, which opened last April in Manhattan's meatpacking district, is a 390 seat, 15,000-square-foot restaurant with all the polished cool of a club. CEO Jean-Yves Haouzi, who helped open the original, moved to New York to ensure that the formula was exported intact. And indeed, the smoldering Fu Manchu decor is there, complete, this time, with a 17-foot-tall black lacquer Buddha presiding over the skylit dining room. The menu of Asian fare infused with "French essences" is in the hands of Paris vets Keith Matsuoka and A. J. Pike. And the requisite sushi menu is handled by Yasuyuki Nagao.
With the aplomb that earned the original its cachet, the New York outpost seems carefully designed to avoid the worst pitfall of the restaurant as club: devolving into a metrosexual rave. From the formality of its barrel vaulted, museological entry to the long gold-leafed bar and sea of round tables, the atmosphere is poised, rather, for dinner with Dorothy Lamour.
Buddakan It's remarkable what $14 million will do for a lumberyard. In the case of Starr's 16,000-square-foot Buddakan, just north of Manhattan's meatpacking district, it's created the queen bee of mega-restaurants (see "Sino Soar," page 52). Accommodating 160 in three separate dining areas and another 100 in its two lounges, it's not the biggest of the big but it's unrivaled in the theatricality with which it plays at being larger-than-life. Just about all the psychotropic ecstasy one can handle is woven into Parisian designer Christian Liaigre's fantastically hard to pin down decor. The four gargantuan dragon-ensnarled chandeliers looming over the communal table in the cavernous main dining room would not be out of place in the castle of a crazed Polish count. Creased and crumpled Mannerist canvases give the impression of having been stolen from a museum. A "library," for private dining, is faux-lined with pigskin folios. The "brasserie" sports Mongolian themed frescoes and a barrage of Buddha imagery (a variation on the big Buddha theme). And, as one enters one flight up, the whole is rimmed by lounges done up in ancient Chinese motifs and punctuated by latticework windows lacquered in soft bright pastel-fluorescent colors. Michael Schulson's predominantly Chinese menu plays the East-West game just as colorfully, with wok hay frog's legs, wild mushroom chow fun, Mongolian lamb chops, roasted skate wing, and whole Peking duck. Is it Marco Polo in Gotham City? The eclecticism straddles the extremes of the Silk Road so stimulatingly that the fun is in not bothering to puzzle it out.
Morimoto Starr's second New York City venture, Morimoto, is as much about big names as it is about the drama that unfolds within its 12,000 square feet. After passing through what may be the world's widest noren, the crimson curtain that flutters across its steel facade, the blush quickly fades to a near monochrome backdrop for Masaharu Morimoto, the former Japanese major league catcher turned kaiseki chef who gained renown on these shores as executive chef at Nobu and widespread fame as star of the television show Iron Chef. Designed by Japan's top name-value architect, Tadao Ando, the temptation to pair these two personalities must have outweighed even practical concerns about the compatibility of Ando's favored material, concrete, with the acoustic requirements of a high-occupancy nightspot. The design—white walls and pale concrete, fritted glass and massive blanched timbers of Douglas fir—both stands back to silhouette the main actor and provides flourishes of its own, quietly employing a few standard tropes of the genre. The pod-style seating, for instance, molded of materials from sandwiched birch (for the omakase bar) to poured concrete (in the lounge). And, most glitteringly, the wall of 17,400 stacked bottles of Ty Nant spring water that climbs the restaurant's two stories alongside its central staircase. Lit with light-emitting diodes, these look strangely reminiscent of pre-plasma cathode television tubes. Supplied by overnight deliveries from Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market, the 300-plus-seat dining scenario provides openings for the big spender—the 16-ounce Kobe New York strip at $98 and a $504 bottle of the chef's own label aged sake (nothing really, if you consider the $1,000 brownie at Brûlée at The Tropicana in Atlantic City)—as well as ways out for the more timid character, such as the $23 ishiyaki buribop, a Korean/Japanese hybrid of yellowtail on rice, cooked at the table in a hot stone bowl.
Tao in Las Vegas Mammoth Tao in Las Vegas is, by comparison, just that—pure Vegas. If its older New York City sibling, which opened in a vacated movie theater in 2000, merely gave the Buddha-Bar theme a sexy, New Age twist—providing refuge for hipsters hard at work on their spiritual life and their Cosmopolitan consumption—the Las Vegas outpost takes that same material and runs with it. Its 400 seat Asian bistro, lounge/bar, nightclub, banquet facility, and pair of VIP skyboxes occupy 42,000 square feet in the world's largest hotel, The Venetian. Dispensing with the word "restaurant," co-owner Richard Wolf calls it "the largest entertainment complex of its kind in Las Vegas, perhaps the world." And why not? The 10,000-square-foot kitchen alone is bigger than most restaurants, meals close with a softball-sized fortune cookie oozing chocolate mousse, and among the 200 selections on the wine list, a dozen are priced above the $1,000 mark. Amidst this unbridled spectacle, chef Sam Hazen's knack with pan-Asian ingredients strikes a note of balance and proportion. Meanwhile, Thomas Schoos's design puts a truckload of Asian antiquities at the service of a fantasy of the Far East as a land of mystery and sensuality, with a level of cultural and historical sensitivity that might embarrass Cecil B. DeMille. The 20-foot-tall Buddha that presides over the two-story bistro, amid light fixtures of inverted incense coils and billowing calligraphic banners, is not only the apogee of the big Buddha motif but the leader of a pack of Buddhist deities in situ that includes a 9,000-pound Kwan Yin at the door of the nightclub. There are so many, in fact, that if disgruntled, they might, perhaps with the help of the 200 statues of Buddhist monks behind the club's bar, easily stage a rebellion.
Del Posto Agleam in dark polished mahogany and inlaid marble, Mario Batali, Joe Bastianich, Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, and Mark Ladner's Del Posto just north of Manhattan's meatpacking district incarnates big as grand. Dominated by a monumental central staircase, the feeling is almost Grand Hotel—"people come, people go"—without the hotel of course. "A grand hotel in the '50s," corrects general manager Alfredo Ruiz. And indeed, the 24,000-square-foot "multiconcept" restaurant courts not only grandeur but traditionalism. Dinner in the à la carte dining area, which seats 68, is a three hour experience, with its share of Old World touches like tableside service. The menu, no mélange of tongue-twisting hybrids, politely suggests, in plainspoken capital letters: grilled asparagus, lamb sweetbreads, swordfish, halibut, calves liver, squab, and many a dish for two, among them: turbot, misto di mare, veal chop, rib eye (these priced in the grand style around $90). Beneath the seigneurial veneer, however, Del Posto's formula is fully of the moment. Groups are ushered to the mezzanine balconies. A more casual enoteca serves full dinners, where the "experience" is reduced to one hour and the prices slightly wilted. There is of course private dining as well as banqueting facilities with their own kitchen. A lounge handles cocktails and small plates. And a dozen stools at the bar greet casual drop-ins. With 300 palates to satisfy in this warren of normal-sized dining experiences, each area is run by a separate team, starting with the host, and at any given moment 40 to 50 staff are on the floor and 30 in the kitchen. Since time takes the blush off any spectacle, Del Posto may have decided to bank on the food rather than pander to transient notions of hip, and has thus confidently set up camp at the time-tested borders of the fusty.
Carnivale A place to lose oneself in the enormous elbow-rubbing throng, Chicago's Carnivale, weighing in at 35,000 square feet and 420 seats, dwarfs even its heftiest New York City counterparts. Designed by co-owner Jerry Kleiner, the restaurant emanates festive generosity rather than high-design cool. The former nightclub space is cheerfully awash in color that seems to fall the two stories from the stained glass skylight in a confetti-like shower past the catwalk, the 80-foot-wide wine rack, and a host of seven-foot-high silk lampshades onto walls painted with overlaying patches of vivid hues. Velvet drapes, some 35-feet-high and festooned with hefty tassels, help to separate the multilevel space flexibly into various private nooks and niches, some of which can accommodate up to 300. The celebratory whorl is lent a bit of earthy tactility by communal tables and the light smattering of cheesecake depictions of Latin American beauties that hang upon the walls. An ideal foil, all in all, for executive chef Mark Mendez's abuelita, or "granny," cuisine—homey dishes adapted from the domestic kitchens of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Argentina, El Salvador, and Mexico.
Karu & Y Recent openings like the David Rockwell–designed Bobby Flay Steak in The Water Club at Borgata in Atlantic City, at 208 seats and 11,000 square feet, almost suggest the trend is capping at a level of sustainable growth. But others, like Karu & Y, which began opening the pieces of its 42,000-square-foot puzzle in Miami's arts and entertainment district in July, continue to push the limits. The brainchild of Brazilian born Cesar Sotomayer, a former Olympic swimmer and commercial airline pilot, the $20 million destination comprises Tottem, an event/performance venue; Tottem Gardens, a 12,000-square-foot "Zen parkland" with waterfalls, "chikki"-hut bars, and seven private cabanas (with beds) accessed by wooden bridges. Also, Y, an "ultralounge" seating 300, some in Boschian podlike enclosures with privacy and ambience controls as well as an inner-sanctum VIP lounge dominated by a Dale Chihuly chandelier, Blue Icicle. And of course the restaurant, Karu, and its private dining room, Mas Allá, where the chef, Alberto Cabrera, formerly at Baleen and Norman's, will offer Spanish alta cocina tinged with the influence of the Americas: finger foods like guava glazed baby pork chops and entrées like oxtail lasagna. Pepe Calderin's design for the restaurant and lounge is somehow reminiscent of the train in Wong Kar Wai's film 2046—hurtling into an imaginary future. "Karu & Y is truly a first-of-its-kind destination that will be the reason people visit Miami," says Sotomayer. Big ambitions, big dreams.
