FOOD AND WINE Designer restaurants
And where is the flock wallpaper now?
Deyan Sudjic Walk into the Cafe Italien des Amis du Vin in Charlotte Street, past the dusty pink doors, the cream walls lined with Photographic blow-ups of opera posters, the cod marbled paintwork, the bentwood chairs, the baskets of hanging ferns, and into the back room, and you get a vivid insight into the brutal realities of modern catering. Cocooned in the midst of this Playground for young men in vivid ties, and suits from Next, gingerly sampling Whitebait for the first time in their lives, is the Bertorelli Room. It is carpeted in what looks like acrylic shredded wheat, and represents an oasis of unreconstructed British restaurant taste. It is the last remains of what was once the most famous family restaurant in London. On this site, generations of Bertorellis served robust, solid food, in an atmosphere with the chilly Charm of an Eastern European railway waiting room,
The Café Italien is anything but a traditional restaurant. Superficially, it appears to be an intimate French bistro. But if you scratch beneath the surface, you find a place whose character has been calculatingly manufactured from start to finish by interior and graphic designers. The café is just one outlet of a many- tentacled catering empire run on the lines of a chain of filling stations that stretches right across Britain. Menus, portion con- trol and management techniques are the same. All that is left to differentiate one branch from another is a skin-deep layer of 'design'. This is the kind of thing that gives design a bad name. It looks cynical and manipulative. But it works.
When dinner for two even at such a modest establishment as Le Café Italien can set you back £50, it is clear that mere nutrition is hardly the point of the exercise. As Drew Smith once said, you could do better staying at home with half a bottle of Sainsbury's wine, a sliver of smoked sal- mon, and some rump steak, and still have Change from a tenner. So what, then, is the Point of all that endless eating out, and of those interminable lunches? The answer of course is that eating in restaurants is a species of spectator sport. Part of the game is to see and be seen. What the place looks and feels like is at least as important as what you find on the plate in front of you.
As a result, the designer has taken on a role that comes close to being as important as that of the chef. The French would put this phenomenon down as yet more evi- dence of English decadence. We even play at restaurants. But of course they are just the same. There is a chain in France that goes by the name Cafe de la Gare that has all its branches done up to look like accordion bars from a mythical Gauloise- soaked past of Simenon and Citroens. They depend on mass-produced etched mirrors, zinc bar counters ordered by the hundred metre length, and bulk-buy signed photos of Piaf and de Gaulle on the walls. But design doesn't have to mean camouflage. If you believe that it has no effect on how food tastes, try substituting plastic for china plates. The problem for British restaurant interiors used to be very much the same as with the food. There was little native tradition of what restaurants should look like, beyond the memory of the faded glories of Simpson's and Rules. If a new tradition is being created now, a slice of the credit must go to Julyan Wickham, an architect who can produce not only a popular restaurant, but also decent modern architecture too. And un- like some restaurant designers, Wickham knows a thing or two about food and drink. In the dim past he was responsible for Dingwall's, and then the Zanzibar. After that there was work for Corney and Bar- row, reinterpreting the traditional city restaurant which then led on to Le Cham- penois underneath Cutler's Garden. Wick- ham's latest, Kensington Place is an update of the traditional French brasserie, and for once that most over-worked of descriptions is actually appropriate. It is a great high-
ceilinged space, that has none of the fake art nouveau fittings that have become an epidemic in what pass for brasseries here. Instead there is an echo of the early modernists of the 1920s, with mighty con- structivist pylons erupting from the floor at intervals in a cavernous single space. Wick- ham has always been good at bars, and Kensington Place's is no exception: wood topped, curvaceous, facing a mirror which. reflects the giant mural at the other end of the room. This is a place that worked in large part because of the design. Its site had been a graveyard for restaurants in the past; Wickham's design rescued it. The huge glass windows provided visible proof that things had changed, and provided a setting that was right for Rowley Leigh's cooking.
The new design boom in London res- taurants goes back to two establishments, the Caprice, re-opened by the fashion magnate Joseph Ettedgui, who used Eva Jircna to give it a splash of monochrome glamour before he sold it on, worried about the heavy loss that almost all res- taurants have to accept in their first few months. At the other pole is Tom Brent's pastel reworking of L'Escargot. In be- tween there is everything from the ludic- rously over-the-top Bill Stickers with zebra skin prints and waitresses dressed like drum majorettes, to the remarkable mini- malism of John Pawson and Claudio SiIves- trin's Wakabe, which, appropriately enough, is dedicated to sushi and which uses only the most rigorously restrained palette of materials.
But there are signs of a backlash against restaurant design. It bothers some — though not all — of the chefs; it is like the artists who complain about architects de- signing art galleries as personal monu- ments, not as places to show pictures. The foodies hit back with militant kitsch, along the lines of Raymond Blanc's first Quat' Saisons in a north Oxford shopping parade that was kitted out with the kind of knick-knacks which would have looked at home in Cynthia Payne's boudoir, which of course is exactly how a lot of French restaurants actually do look.
From the point of view of the food purists, the danger of resorting to kitsch is that the designers can fake that too. Now that the design genie is out of the bottle there is no way of putting it back. London is following in the footsteps of Barcelona, where bars and restaurants compete for the most arresting look in town, enjoy rapid fame, and then fade away when the next bright young thing comes along.
Deyan Sudjic is editor of Blueprint and writes regularly on design for the Times and the Sunday Times,
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