Where Every Restaurant Is a Theme Restaurant

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The New York Sun

It is almost certain that you’ve never been to Donohue’s, my favorite restaurant in New York. The exterior of this Upper East Side eatery, which opened during the Truman administration, is so inconspicuous that you could pass it a thousand times – as I did – without ever feeling the urge to enter. When I finally did, after living nearby for two years, my reason was as follows: I pass this place every day and never go in. And so I went in, only to be dazzled by the time warp that unfolded before my eyes, the tomato-colored tablecloths, the fizzy pink light emanating from a small lamp at each black banquette, the drab flatware of the postwar years, and a dependable fare of chops, burgers, and sea-food. Needless to say, you won’t find Donohue’s in Zagats.


What first impressed me about the place, and what still impressed me when I ate there last Wednesday, was its interior design – if you can call it that. Unlike almost every other restaurant in New York, this one has no subtext. It is four wood-covered walls, some tables, two waitresses, a bar, and a room full of happy regulars. There was a time when most New York restaurants looked like this. They were, simply put, a zone in which you ate. But starting about a generation ago, restaurants began to embody a concept, even a philosophy. Not merely the food, but the very design had to communicate something edgy or charmingly domestic, something artsy or Indian, something Brazilian or fusion, or any number of other things.


This theme-restaurant trend started with such lions of hospitality as Warner LeRoy, whose mythic Maxwell’s Plum defined what it meant to be in New York in the 1960s. In more recent years, the supreme arbiter of culinary meaning, more than most chefs, may be David Rockwell.


Consider that, in the past few months alone, five new Rockwell-designed restaurants have opened: Nobu 57 (at 40 W. 57th Street), Country (at the Carlton Hotel on Madison Avenue), Bar Americain (at 152 W. 52nd Street), District (at Muse Hotel on West 46th Street), and, just this past week, Rosa Mexicano (at 9 E. 18th Street).To these you can add the previous Nobu in TriBeCa, the Rosa Mexicano opposite Lincoln Center, Geisha on East 61st Street, and Town, in the Chambers Hotel on West 56th Street.


Mr. Rockwell’s designs for these dining spaces are so theatrical that no one should be too surprised to learn that he has also conceived the sets for such Broadway hits as “Hairspray” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” And it is in the nature of theatrical design that Mr. Rockwell is of necessity a pluralist: He seems to have few formal core convictions, unless that term can be applied to the ad hoc willingness to try almost anything in the pursuit of some fashionable effect.


The new Rosa Mexicano shares with its Lincoln Center forebear an entire wall in the form of a waterfall whose blue mosaic tiles are dotted with hundreds of tiny plastic divers that recall the pearl-fishers of Acapulco. The restaurant’s vast and cavernous space is defined by, among other things, bare brick pillars and adobe partition walls painted in the rough, earthy hues of Mexico. These colors are picked up in the multicolored fabric of the seats and in the cracked tile floors at the entrance. Even the bathrooms are guacamole green.


But Mr. Rockwell has no interest in persuading you that you are in Mexico. With his jaunty, postmodern vocabulary, he has taken a national idiom and pulled its apart, abstracted the pieces, and reconstituted them in his own terms. The effect is like a cubist guitar: Though it retains many recognizable elements of a guitar, it has been thoroughly transfigured.


Much the same approach marks Mr. Rockwell’s new Nobu 57,an overwhelmingly tawny affair whose two levels are accented with backlit marble (one of Mr. Rockwell’s signatures), an abundance of warped and textured woods, and what looks like dried plant remains. Clearly Mr. Rockwell associates these design elements with Japan, since they can also be found in his much smaller and more intimate Geisha.


Another idiom that Mr. Rockwell favors is art-deco modernism, which characterizes Bar Americain, Country, District, and Town. Curved banquettes in near isolation sprawl across the carpets of Bar Americain, beneath round lamps covered in textured fabrics and beside pillars illuminated from within. If Rosa Mexicano looks south of the border, and Nobu looks back to Meiji Japan, here we have a reverie of that zoot-suited America of the early 20th century. You can easily imagine Walter Winchell types, shot in black and white, sitting in the circular booths as cigarette girls pass before the camera’s lens.


Mr. Rockwell’s interiors are also marked by a preference for clutter and the free association of forms. This is in contrast to the rigorous order of, for example, Richard Meier’s 66 Restaurant in TriBeCa, or the deconstructivist antics of Diller and Scofidio in Brasserie, in the basement of the Seagram Building. Sometimes, you sense a lack of control, as in the spatial arrangements on the upper level of Nobu 57. At other times, what results is a clashing sequence of discrete environments, like those of Geisha.


For the most part, though, Mr. Rockwell rises with distinction to meet the challenges of the spaces he has been called on to reinvent. If architectural fashions change faster in New York than most anywhere else, the fashions of interior design change faster still, and never faster than in the restaurants of the Big Apple. But, then, restaurants in general and their interior design in specific were never meant to transcend their age, but rather to embody it as it passed. And few designers have done so more enthusiastically than David Rockwell.


jgardner@nysun.com


The New York Sun

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