Designer of elegant NYC restaurants
Philip George, who designed the interiors of some of New York City’s most star-studded restaurants and oversaw a shortlived but indelible Moscow culinary landmark — the site of the impromptu Cold War “kitchen debate” between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev — died May 10 at a clinic in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He was 94.
His death, which was announced only recently, was confirmed by his wife, Gail Cowdrey George.
Mr. George’s career encompassed several incarnations, but they converged in his preoccupation with imagery: How foreigners in Southeast Asia and post-World War II Europe regarded the United States in the global competition against communism. How airline passengers perceived Braniff’s jelly-bean-colored fleet of planes. And whether diners preferred the elegant, clatter-free aura of Le Bernardin in midtown Manhattan or, downtown, the cacophony of the Big Kitchen at the original World Trade Center or the Market Bar there, which, as Mr. George put it, was “a place that was supposed to imply business and market activity, and the last thing you would want is a lot of carpet and quiet.”
Mr. George also designed the Sea Grill at Rockefeller Center in the early 1980s. Often with collaborators, including Joe Baum, Milton Glaser and Irving Harper, he figured prominently in the design of the patrons’ dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, among other restaurants, Mondrian, on East 59th Street, and Aurora, on East 49th Street. (Both have closed.)
Writing about Aurora in 1986, restaurant critic Bryan Miller of The New York Times said its room “combines a very establishment, corporate ambiance (burnished wood wainscoting, muted colors, cushy leather chairs) with a playful bubble theme more appropriate to a trendy yuppie bar — a blend of martinis and margaritas.”
“I haven’t seen so many bubbles since ‘ The Lawrence Welk Show,’ “he added.
When the siblings Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze opened Le Bernardin in 1986, in the Equitable Building on West 51st Street, they commissioned Mr. George for the interior. (It was renovated in recent years.) Le Bernardin went on to earn, and maintain, a three-star rating in the Michelin Guide and four stars from The Times.
French chef and author Pierre Franey once described its kitchen, designed by Mr. George, as “the best in the United States and one of the best in the world.”
While working for George Nelson & Co., the New York industrial designer, Mr. George was named project manager for the construction of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, part of a cultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The show, which ran for six weeks in 1959, featured a geodesic dome in Sokolniki Park housing exhibits on 300,000 square feet of floor space.
The displays trumpeted American products with, as one observer said, “a wearying emphasis on credibility, on avoiding the air of propaganda.”
Included were automobiles, television sets and shelves restocked with thousands of pairs of jeans for the taking by Soviet visitors.
“He planned on them being stolen,” Mr. George’s friend John S. Dyson, a former New York City and state official, said in a telephone interview. “Soon, all over Moscow kids were wearing his jeans that were otherwise forbidden. He had thousands brought for just this effect.”
On opening day of the exhibition, Mr. Nixon, who was vice president at the time, played host to Mr. Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, and soon they were viewing a model of a modern American kitchen. It became the stage for a brief but historic exchange on the respective merits of communism and capitalism — the kitchen, from Mr. Nixon’s perspective, representing the triumph of the free market.
Mr. Nixon and Mr. Khrushchev had been steered to the kitchen by William Safire, a public relations man at the time for the Long Island developer who built it (Mr. Safire was later a Nixon speechwriter and a Times columnist), and Mr. George was by Mr. Safire’s side as Mr. Nixon sang the praises of a dishwasher and other appliances.
Mr. George would go on to receive accolades from restaurant and architecture reviewers for his interior designs, but in Moscow, he encountered perhaps his most petulant critic.
Mr. Khrushchev, it seemed, was unimpressed. “You think the Russian people will be dumbfounded to see these things,” he said, “but the fact is that newly built Russian houses have all this equipment right now.”
Phil Basil George Jr. was born on July 22, 1923, in San Bernardino, Calif.
He began using Philip because everyone was calling him by that name.
His father, Philippos Basileus Georgiadis, a Greek immigrant who abbreviated his name when he arrived at Ellis Island, owned several cafes in San Diego.
His mother, who was born in Spain as Josephine Sanchez, worked in the cafes part time.
“As a son of immigrants, he embraced his life as an American with pride,” said Mary R. Morgan, another friend of Mr. George’s.
In addition to design, Mr. George also plunged into politics in the 1960s, working with the consulting firm David Garth Associates on the graphics for campaigns by Mayor John V. Lindsay and Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York, Gov. Brendan T. Byrne of New Jersey, Rep. John Heinz III of Pennsylvania and Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, among others.