Games changer
A new gadget aims to reinvent gaming
It could have been a cool alarm clock or a calculator. The criteria was simply to make “something to put in people’s hands” for fans of the company: a thank-you to mark its 15th birthday. In the end, US software firm Panic Inc decided its debut product would be a games machine. “We landed on doing an updated version of a Nintendo Game & Watch from the early Eighties,” says Greg Maletic, Panic’s director of special projects, referring to the hand-held games with simple controls and LCD displays. Playdate is a tiny, yellow, hand-held system with a black-and-white screen, chunky buttons and an analogue crank that flips out from its side, providing a novel control element. It’s been built in collaboration with Teenage Engineering, the Swedish company known for its cult £85 “pocket operator” synthesisers that have won over kids and musicians alike. The crank doesn’t power the device as you might expect: it controls the games. “The second we saw that concept we were in love with it — it’s exactly the kind of weird idea we wanted to embrace,” says Maletic. Games will be delivered wirelessly once a week and in “seasons”: the first, of 12 episodes, is preloaded. They will also be a total surprise when they arrive. “Some are short, some long, some are experimental, some traditional,” says Panic. “All are fun.”
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“Essentially, people thought I was mad,” says John Whelan. “No-one cool wanted to touch it with a bargepole. It was the lamest of the lame.” Whelan is talking about his decision to revamp a dozen French brasseries: floor-to-ceiling refits that involved restoring faded frescoes, replacing broken chandeliers and reproducing original banquettes, as well as overhauling the menus, changing the branding and refreshing the staff uniforms.
“People call me an interior designer because I do a lot of interiors work but I see myself as a creative director of brands. This was more like relaunching the French brasserie as an institution,” he says. “That was the challenge more than cosmetic surgery on the interiors.”
It was a sizeable undertaking for an Oxfordeducated history buff with no formal design training. And one made even more so by the fact the French brasseries in question were in France. A coals to Newcastle assignment made more unexpected still by the fact that, unlike, say, in London, with its beloved Corbin & King tributes to the grand art deco establishments of Thirties Europe, brasseries in France were considered irredeemably naff. Menus had not changed much since the Belle Époque and remained under the tyranny of meat-in-brown-sauce: entrecôte de boeuf, souris d’agneau and magret de canard.
“Brasserie groups had been taking the piss since the Eighties,” says Whelan. “Terrible food, laminated menus, buses of tourists. They were cashing in, in the most awful way. So the French rightly abandoned ship. At the same time, Parisians became enthralled with the neo-bistro scene in New York and London; the trendy restaurants with exposed brick, filament bulbs and bearded chef with tattoos. Rather than seeking to save their heritage, they were more interested in what they were doing in America or London.”
Reasoning that restaurant restoration jobs tended to end up “weird”, “botched” and even worse, “looking a bit Candy & Candy”, Whelan set out to return these cavernous institutions to their former glories. Teasing out their “true” nature through careful addition and subtraction.
At Brasserie Floderer in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, he restored the dark wood walls, zinc bar and waiters in traditional long aprons of its art nouveau origins. At Bouillon Julien, a landmark on the Rue de Faubourg Saint-Denis, he revived the peacock panelling, rescued the stained glass ceiling and reverted the tobacco-coloured interior to its original sea green. And at Brasserie Excelsior, in Reims, he restored the 19th-century mouldings, took out the drop ceiling and decorated the room with Limoges porcelain and a wallpaper mural of a sunset over Rome based on a painting by David Roberts. “All of a sudden it became like a Wes Anderson film set,” he says, not incorrectly.
Working for the restaurant group Les Grandes Brasseries de l’Est, Whelan has renovated brasseries in Paris and eastern France at the rate of four per year, for the last three years. His final project is Terminus Nord, the tourist trap corner brasserie opposite the French capital’s notoriously grotty Gare du Nord. “The number of times I’ve had a shit meal in there…” Whelan sighs. “I felt like I’d come full circle.”
In doing so he had managed to bring some authenticity back to the French brasserie. “The return of young customers was the major victory,” he says. “Prior to the rework, no hipsters would have been seen dead in a brasserie.” The fact it took a Brit to persuade them to do so wasn’t lost on the French. “There were headlines in Paris Match saying, ‘Englishman Restores the French Brasserie’,” he grins.