Delicious Design

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

If ever you feel disenchanted with the architecture of Gotham, head indoors. Our exteriors may be morbidly unimaginative, but all sorts of interesting things happen when architects let their imaginations roam through the inner spaces of the town. The design of these interiors is to the design of exteriors rather as theoretical math and physics are to their more practical stepsisters: Liberated from both local ordinances and the laws of gravity, they suggest the way the buildings that contain them might look in a climate more propitious to architecture, such as, say, Miami, Sydney, or Shanghai.

One of the best new instances of interior architecture – interior design is too weak a term – is Buddakan, a new restaurant at 75 Ninth Avenue in the Meatpacking district. If proof were needed of the overweening opulence of Manhattan at the present time, here it is. This brilliantly conceived interior is the sort of place that would have provoked sumptuary laws in times gone by. Indeed, though most architectural writers have yet to weigh in on the matter,many restaurant reviewers sound variously insulted and outraged by its extravagance.

But the best-designed restaurants, like the best baroque churches, have always had a scenographic aspect to them. In theory, a restaurant’s interior is meant to provide pleasure and comfort for its clients as they consume the food for which they remunerate the owners. Buddakan, however, seems to have come unhinged from any practical or monetary motive.

In his determination to create something dazzling, the famed Philadelphian restaurateur Stephen Starr has far surpassed such fabled spaces of la belle epoque as the now-vanished Oak Room and Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel. Whatever their opulence, they were conceived with an eye to ultimate remuneration. At Buddakan, by contrast, Mr. Starr seems to be in it for his personal glory, not to mention the greater glory of dining and design – two disciplines that grow ever more intimately connected with each passing day.

I have been to Buddakan twice. The first time was at night, the second time on a sunny afternoon. On both occasions, the cavernous space, designed by Christian Liaigre, seemed so dark, so enveloped in evocative glooms, that, even though the establishment has windows, one would be hard put to say what time of day it was.

The point is to create a totalizing experience in which food and decor coalesce into a kind of secular sacrament.The gray, minimalist, one-story box that contains the restaurant is elegant in its severity, but is mainly intended to belie the opulence within.

Through a doorway almost as grand as a cathedral’s, you enter a simple antechamber with gleaming white walls and stainless-steel mesh on the floors. The door closes behind you, shutting you off from the rude imperfections of the street, before admitting you, a purgatorial aspirant, to the purified wealth within.Now you enter a lofty, benighted realm where the hostess, standing at a long metal reception desk in front of a reproduction of one of Reubens’s scenes of carousal, directs you to your table.

From here, you enter a bar area adorned with Chinese paintings, modernist chairs, and bare brick walls, before you pass into the dining area. Though this upper area has dining spaces surrounding the central atrium, the coup de theatre is reserved for a two-story main dining room whose ceiling is 40 feet high.The room is done up in the style of Franco Zeffirelli’s exorbitant dreams of operatic opulence.

First glimpsed through teakwood screens in various Chinese and Arab motifs, the space is descended into along a steep stairway. Its relatively few seats are set beneath three powerful chandeliers that hang down from the ceiling on stems almost 30 feet long. As befits a fusion restaurant that culls freely from European and Asian sources, the oriental motifs and lacquered vases sit in jarring juxtaposition to sudden blasts of the European canon, specifically large-scale silk-screen reproductions of 16-thcentury European Mannerist paintings.

After passing through dining chambers so dark that, I confess, I banged into things, one arrives at a delightful oasis of light in the form of antique bookshelves lit from below that give off a Kubrickian oddity. What point this or anything else could possibly serve is hard to say, but it looks wonderful.The food, by the way, is every bit as fine as the decor.

***

If Buddakan qualifies as the talk of the town, the same can be said for the third coming of Le Cirque, which has moved around Midtown and the Upper East Side before coming to rest in the grand mid-block court of the new Bloomberg building. Designed by Rafael Pelli, this space, with its spiraling, conical drum, is so special that it was hard to imagine what could live up to it. From a purely culinary perspective, Le Cirque is an inspired choice.

The interior design is by Adam Tihany, the man who created the dazzlingly wacko fun-house decor of the restaurant’s previous avatar in the Vuillard House on 51st Street and Madison Avenue. Now a decade older and wiser, Mr. Tihany has calmed down considerably. His design is good, in parts very good, even though it never ascends to that obsessive, almost totalitarian perfection that marks Buddakan.

The best thing about it is the lofty dining chamber, which makes the most of the external curvature of the conical drum of the building that contains it. Swinging round in a lurching, giddy waltz, the space accentuates that movement with an elaborated dropped ceiling fashioned out of silk. Other elements of the design, like the two-story glass-enclosed wine silo and the cubistic and metallic bar area, are well conceived by themselves, but do not accord with one another or with the dining area.

Unfortunately, the second story, intended for private parties, exhibits a complete exhaustion of the designer’s imagination. It’s main zazz, if you will, consists in the use of sundry simian motifs a la Picasso, an artistic vocabulary that French restaurants the world over have invoked for years in order to seem less stodgy. That said, the space itself is so eccentric that it is hard to say what, if anything, could fit perfectly within its expansive interior.

Taken together, Buddakan and Le Cirque, as well as several dozen other new restaurants, attest to the ever-escalating demand for luxury among New Yorkers, both in dining and design. But such longings transcend the conspicuous consumption of years past. Possessed of an almost religious sense of righteousness, even restraint within opulence, their fine dining and finer decor are becoming the articles of a new faith.

jgardner@nysun.com


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use