Jankowski’s partner Jan Martin, an interior designer, notes that when the pair started out in the mid-1980s, only big places hired designers. Professional fees made business sense for a 10,000-square-foot nightclub, but not for little guys. Now, even small shops have to think about design, just to keep up with the competition.
The pressure on restaurateurs is part of a larger trend: an aesthetic imperative affecting people, places, and things. Target sells high style to the mass market. Graphic design is ubiquitous and mandatory, thanks to desktop publishing and font-filled word processors. Hair coloring and plastic surgery are booming. We’re increasingly conscious, and demanding, of how things look and feel.
For today’s restaurants, then, “atmosphere” demands more than tablecloths and candles in a darkened room. Restaurateurs have to create what a trade-show booth designer calls, referring to his own business, “a complete environment—one that gets inside the minds of the attendees and triggers the right feelings.” To satisfy customers, restaurants must fulfill not just physical but psychological and emotional needs.
Some patrons want stimulation—variety, entertainment, and excitement you don’t get at home. Borrowing movie lingo, Rodriguez uses the term “story line” to refer to the guiding visions for his restaurants. The story line for the upscale new Mercury at Willow Bend is “classic, modern furniture,” while Taco Diner’s story line imagines a feminine sensibility, as if the restaurant were owned by a woman. Different story lines suit different customers and different moods.
Other restaurateurs take the story line idea more literally, developing theme restaurants with underlying narratives. When Mike Leatherwood hired Zero 3 to design Bone Daddy’s House of Smoke on Central Expressway near the Dallas-Richardson border, the premise was that a guy who owned a junkyard had opened a restaurant to sell barbeque. The imaginary owner had built the place out of the junk he had on hand. Bone Daddy’s features telephone poles, old signs, complex and visible ductwork, and original folk art.
Bone Daddy’s has thrived, but restaurants that lean too heavily on thematic décor can get old fast. Nationally, many celebrated theme restaurants have crashed. Planet Hollywood went bankrupt (although its restaurants are still around), and Steven Spielberg’s submarine-themed Dive! in LA closed altogether. Gimmicks attract tourists and curiosity seekers, but you need more emotional resonance, not to mention better food, to sustain a clientele.
Martin defines a restaurant’s atmosphere with a question: “How does a person feel when they’re sitting in the space?” Different styles create different feelings—excitement, coziness, comfort, pride. Form follows emotion.
For many patrons, an attractive restaurant provides a sort of stage set, a place to look good. “The restaurant scene in Dallas is based on showing off,” says a friend, pointing to M Crowd’s Citizen in Oak Lawn. “It’s almost impossible to walk in there and not have everybody see you,” he says. “It’s like everybody’s on stage. The owners know very well that people in Dallas go out to be seen.”
Martin offers a gentler, but compatible, interpretation. In a casual world, restaurants can provide an appropriate setting for finery. “Sometimes I want a place to wear a dress-up dress,” she says. But smart design won’t turn off casual customers, particularly in Dallas, where the perfectly turned-out woman is often accompanied by a man in a rumpled polo shirt. “High-end casual dining” means never having to say no to a customer, even implicitly.
To produce a high-end environment without scaring away casual diners, The Mercury blends classic, mid-century modern furnishings with unexpected touches of color and whimsy (see review on p. 95). The white leather bar stools have zippers, a “go-go boot” look, and paintings in mod colors that line the mezzanine.
“We’re after a specific clientele,” says Rodriguez. “But we’re also warm and hospitable.” The Mercury isn’t going for snob appeal. “People don’t need to know that it’s Platner or Eames,” he says. “All they have to know is they feel good in the space.”
The most successful restaurant design offers more than a stage. It becomes an accessory, an expression of the patron’s personal style, aspiration, and identity—a dining room of one’s own, but away from home. Of course, the great advantage of eating out is that you don’t have to stick to a single cuisine, or a single aesthetic. You can be modern one day, rustic the next. You can skip from Asia to Europe to Latin America, from country comfort to haute cuisine, over the course of the week.
Now that eating out is no longer a Sunday-only affair, we can change our restaurants the way we change our clothes. That means restaurant environments have become fashion. Some are fads, lasting just a season. Some are basics, the equivalent of blue jeans and polo shirts. Others are stylish classics. And, like all personal style choices, restaurant picking has its risks. When I invited Mike Cox to lunch at Taco Diner, he hated the cobalt blue tile and thought the place was too noisy. So much for my beloved oasis. At least he liked the food.
Mico Rodriguez wants his customers to take his restaurants personally. “The environment I’m in is going to be an accessory to who I am,” he says, recalling one of his proudest moments as a restaurateur. “A sharp guy, a Hispanic doctor told me, ’Mico, your restaurants are the way I want to live.’ That brought tears to my eyes.”
Contributing Editor Virginia Postrel is an economics columnist for The New York Times and the author of The Future and Its Enemies. She is writing a book on the growing importance of aesthetics, to be published by HarperCollins in 2003.
