FOODÉCOR
Nothing holds the promise of good food with more poetic immediacy than splashes of tantalizing evidence on display. Ted Gachot casts a ravening eye.
Ted Gachot reports.
Chefs have classically kept their larders out of sight behind the heavy treasure-house doors of walk-ins. But just as the wall separating kitchen from dining room has become as optional as a necktie when public interest widened to include chefs, with the current focus on what one eats-which foods, where they're from, how they're grown-more chefs and designers are looking at their larders with the eye of the director who has just removed a pair of Coke-bottle glasses from the lowly (but indeed lovely) script girl.
As a visual language, food is not only rich with enticements but immediately understood. "A tomato is a tomato," says New York City-based designer Tony Chi, who made this streamlined logic the organizing principal and visual keynote of Keyakizaka in the Grand Hyatt Tokyo. Guests sit at the edge of a sizzling teppan, a custom-made plancha cooking surface, facing a ready chef and an array of produce arranged and labeled in wooden crates as if at a farmers' market. "Here the visual link between consumer and product is direct, without even a menu as a translator," Chi explains. Pointing is the lingua franca: this sprightly bok choy or that good-looking cut of beef is prepared à la minute, and to taste, under one's nose.
Putting it out there, however, need not entail naked simplicity. "You can use the food display to express your intention," notes Chi. To match José Andrés' flamboyant, alchemical style, Philippe Starck's design for The Bazaar at SLS in Beverly Hills makes a leitmotif of glass, notably bell jars and vitrines. As the kitchen opens abruptly into Rojo, the main restaurant, glass-fronted coolers and a hydroponic garden advertise their contents. Artichokes and pears overflow jumbo Martini glasses flanking Blanca, the tapas bar, and the Patisserie offers the one-stop L.A. equivalent of trips to Rumpelmayer's and the American Museum of Natural History, with its meringue-like furnishings and fanciful desserts set out under glass canopies like so many specimens.
Glass, in this case, serves as a sort of alembic, drawing attention to the contrast between the dishabille of raw materials and the dandified poise of finished dishes. Its gleam and transparency lend finish and-in a world where Damien Hirst's formaldehyde tanked sharks go for millions-even a sort of glamour to foodstuffs. At the towering Park Hyatt Shanghai, 100 Century Avenue sprawls over three floors, punctuated by open cooking stations dedicated to various menu items, not least a Peking duck-roasting station where the finished wares hang in a custom glass case. Visible meat-aging chambers, like Keyakizaka's three sealed glass columns, anchoring the plancha, may even be poised for a comeback.
Food displays, like open kitchens, are about openness, transparency, showing off quality, and whetting appetites. As Chi puts it, in his signature blend of design wisdom and four-letter interjections: "To inspire people-by what they see, the sound of cooking, all this makes the dining experience memorable and brings them into the process. You have a cook, a customer, produce. Bring them together and **** happens."
