Feast Your Eyes

By Richard Lacayo

Even if you didn't know how often high-end restaurant design is all about the search for glamorous novelties, you would figure it out as soon as you set foot in Megu, a new Japanese place in lower Manhattan where the "edomae nigiri sushi" goes for as much as $90 a person and where, in the center of the main dining room, you will find a 5-ft.-high ice sculpture of the Buddha that, no surprise, is replaced every day. Ice? Well, if you forget every banquet-hall buffet centerpiece you've ever seen, it's possible to think of ice as the last word in enigmatic swank, prettier than crystal, hard enough to be a murder weapon but more perishable than cashmere. In this lavishly conceived room, with its pillars made from earthenware sake vessels and its massive temple bell, the ice actually looks rather elegant. And when it has been carved into the Buddha, one that's ever so gradually melting away all evening, ice can even guide you toward musings about the evanescence of the material world--presuming you're the type who can think about such things while picking at a $180 plate of Kobe beef.

We live in a world of proliferating celebrity chefs and their would-be four-star palaces, places where morsels of fennel confit repose in their pools of lemon jus, where there's almost as much Prada on the clientele as there is at most Prada stores and where the wine list has bottles that cost more than a six-disc CD player. At these prices, it's not enough to sell just food. Atmosphere, cachet, sex appeal, status--all those are on the menu too, and it's largely the job of the decor to provide them. (Or to lure the crowd that completes the picture.) This is why restaurants are now second only to museums as the places where designers get to take their most audacious ideas out to play. In London and Milan, along the Pacific Rim, in Miami and Los Angeles and even Bombay, restaurants are the hot design laboratories.

But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to play mad scientist in them. Public dining rooms are also like cathedrals. You go to them looking for a mixture of spectacle and serenity. You want to be awestruck. You're also hoping to find space for a little quiet reflection, even if it's just over the pros and cons of a seared scallop. And while it's true that a long evening at a good table should also provide some theater, a sense of occasion, the occasion should not be Halloween. When you're trying to focus on the contrast between your garlic steamed branzino and the lingonberry-walnut chutney it came with, you don't want too much distraction coming from the window trims. It's bad enough that you may be addressing this question after your third glass of that witty, ambitious Bordeaux.

Restaurants as we know them first flourished in France after the revolution, many opened by chefs set loose from the households of displaced aristocrats. What the chefs sought to reproduce at their new establishments was the plush atmosphere of the estates they had left behind. For centuries, as the idea of the restaurant spread across the world, the memory of the aristocratic dining room echoed in the ornate design of the most sumptuous eating places. "You used to find those echoes in chandeliers and vaulted ceilings and carved moldings," says designer Adam Tihany. "But that doesn't work with contemporary chefs. They've surpassed this need for ornamentation, but they don't want to totally give up their ties to the past."

Seven years ago, Tihany pulled those ties into some ingenious loops with his design for Le Cirque 2000 in New York City, a kinetic interaction of whimsical furnishings in 19th century Renaissance Revival rooms. For Per Se, the new venture by chef Thomas Keller that opened this winter in New York City, Tihany produced a more serene version of luxe. Along with four other celebrity chefs, Keller has taken the gamble of locating his restaurant in a multilevel shopping mall in the new Time Warner Center. The building is a prestigious address overlooking Central Park but gourmet principalities don't usually rub shoulders with Banana Republics. So Tihany has provided Keller with a setting of subdued but indisputable luxury, the kind that says, Hey, Starbucks may be downstairs, but we're not them.

With its velvety upholstery and seating that drew inspiration from several eras of the 19th and 20th centuries, Per Se is quietly but palpably linked to the past. At Isola in Hong Kong the old world suddenly rises up in a white steel screen cut to resemble lace. Other new places have been trying to connect to a more recent past--the 1950s and '60s. At the new digs of Toque! in Montreal, the crimson-and-violet palette and the globe light fixtures bring to mind a place where Sinatra might have taken the Rat Pack, assuming those guys had been savvy enough to appreciate chef Normand Laprise's seared foie gras and his guinea fowl with turnip galette. And at Lever House, in the renovated Park Avenue office building of the same name, diners enter through a long, stark, white hexagonal corridor that looks like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One way to understand the history of the luxury restaurant over the past half-century or so is to trace its evolution in New York City. From the moment it opened in 1959, the last word in glittery Manhattan feedlots was the Four Seasons. It instantly laid claim to the glamour of both old New York--after all, it was on Park Avenue--and new New York, because it was on the ground floor of the Seagram Building, the signal achievement of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, stern papa of the glass-and-steel modernism that postwar corporate America had embraced as its house style. The luminous dining rooms, designed by Mies and his canny apostle Philip Johnson, were plain announcements that the new American power elite would henceforth have its own form of sleek, spare luster, a thing built out of tubular-steel chairs and Picassos on the walls.

In the late '50s and early '60s, however, there also arose a trio of New York restaurants--La Caravelle, La Cote Basque and Lutece--that defined high-end dining in older, more pillowy and Parisian terms: pastel walls, cushioned banquettes and floral arrangements the size of orbiting weather satellites. If the Four Seasons represented the New Frontier, those haute French eateries insisted on the enduring relevance of the old ways. But within the past year, all three have closed, and with them an era has ended. Fine dining has become simultaneously more informal and more hard edged. White-linen tablecloths are giving way to place mats. Celebrity chefs are opening new outposts in "transitional" parts of town that look more accustomed to Kentucky Fried Chicken than citron grilled squab. "People don't necessarily want predictability from an eating experience," says David Rockwell, the prolific designer of, among other places, Nobu, the Asian-fusion restaurant, co-owned by Robert De Niro, that brought a keen-edged style to Tribeca long before Tribeca had its own film festival. "They want an adventure."

A growing sense of adventure would help explain why the hottest new dinner destination in Manhattan these days is the meat-packing district. That is the neighborhood of Spice Market, yet another outpost of the ubiquitous star chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. It's also where the faint, stale odor of cows' intestines still clings to the streets. Then there's the Market District in Chicago, where the aromas are less apparent but the general ambiance of funky warehouse-style buildings is the same. Yet one of those contains Moto, where the food is superb, if a bit too theatrical--what's with the medical pipettes brought to the table so that you can squirt seafood broth into your mouth?--and the uppermost prix-fixe menu costs an unfunky $160 a person.

The decor at Moto is strictly minimalist modern: bare walls and simple black tables with white linen runners. Minimalism is an approach that can provide a clean, of-the-moment look, like the one Christian Liaigre brought to Yauatcha in London or that Alain Ducasse favors for his new Spoon in Hong Kong. But it also opens the way to dullsville. Even as suave a modernist as Richard Meier, the architect of the masterly Getty Center in Los Angeles, stumbles in parts of 66, the Manhattan restaurant he designed for Vongerichten. The long, long table that greets you as you enter, at which a phalanx of diners perched in classic wire-web Bertoia chairs can face one another, is one of the handsomest settings in town. But brace yourself before heading for the bathrooms, which are housed in a passage so sterile it puts the hospital in hospitality.

If luxury-restaurant design has a default setting, it's "golden glow." You see a lot of gold-tinted walls, refulgent fabrics, shimmery plush. Have a drink in the bar at Patina, the restaurant on the ground floor of Frank Gehry's magnificent Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and you're in a place that actually holds its own against the radiance of Gehry's steel-and-titanium exterior. Gold is the color that ties the very latest places to those old aristocratic households. It's also the color of money, which helps you keep in mind that at the end of every enchanted evening, somebody still has to call for the check.