San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How does beauty enhance dining?
Sitting at the marble bar at Mourad, it’s hard not to feel simultaneously beautified and cowed. Slim gold pendants hover a half-story above my head. The tile patterns under my barstool threaten to hypnotize if I stare down too long. When I twist around to look back into the dining room, supernova chandeliers diffuse disco stars across a space that is at once angular and creamy. Of course we go to restaurants like Mourad for the food, but we also go there because their beauty transforms us, in ways we rarely articulate. And yet the source of their alchemical powers can be hard to locate. Bix and Rintaro, Epic Steak and Foreign Cinema look very little like one another. Some elicit a double take when we enter. Others seem to make us glow brighter the longer we sit at the table.
Last month I set out on an eight-restaurant walking tour whose purpose wasn’t just to identify what makes a restaurant beautiful but to ask: What purpose does its beauty serve?
from says “Restaurants Cass other Calder public are Smith, spaces,” different who has designed more than 100 of them. Unlike a courthouse, museum or even an Apple store, he clarifies, their grandeur must both impress us and invite us in. We may walk through the City Hall atrium, neck at midflight tilt-back. We spend three hours around the table at the Smith-designed 25 Lusk. Restaurant designers must consciously manage how diners are lit, how we’re seated in relation to the other tables and how the room sounds, all of which affect us in unconscious ways.
an The upper-middle-class most restaurants appeal dramatically of San seems Francisco’s beautiful one. to be It’s no Chronicle significant four-star that there restaurants are on the list. Saison, Quince, Benu, Atelier Crenn and Californios all have well-furnished rooms, to be sure, but the point of the design is to assume wealth, not project it. There, our gaze is meant to float, detached, in the rare moments when the food is not keeping it transfixed.
One way to think about the transformational power of beautiful restaurants, says my restaurant-crawl companion, Oakland architecture Professor Scott Elder, is their ability to create or reinforce an imaginary, or in his words, “a constructive set of beliefs that make you think about a place and its people in a shaped way.” In sociological terms, a nation is an imaginary. So is the internet.
There is a whole subset of academia focused on tourism imaginaries, all the ideas that Americans project onto, say, Southeast Asia, that make it appealing for outsiders to travel there. To Pat Kuleto, legendary designer of Epic Steak and Boulevard, as well as 200 other restaurants here and gone, a beautiful restaurant is such an escape.
“One of the big ideas that I try to do is to make (a restaurant) people day-to-day a real can get life experience, out of sitting of their so in a cubicle or whatever they’re doing that’s not really thrilling, to get them into another world, transferred into a different state of mind,” Kuleto says. “I try to make it a combination of comfortable and exciting, full of things to look at.”
story Kuleto for each comes project up with and a then designs a space that tells it. Boulevard, for example, is his tale of a bistro set in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The light gilds everyone it touches. The ceiling may not soar like Mourad’s but, vaulted and bricked, it blankets the viewer in an antiquarian romance. The wood surfaces appear as if they shine from a hundred years of polishing, and everywhere your glance falls is some piece of craftsmanship to study. (On the phone, Kuleto reminds me to look down at the intricate mosaic on the bar floor.)
The same air of the otherworldly can be found at Martin Cate’s Whitechapel, which could be a set for a Victorian mystery on HBO, or the 98-year-old Far East Cafe in Chinatown, whose ornate chandeliers and checkered tile floors were once built to assuage crossPacific longing but now also take the imagination back a century as well.
The other imaginary that beautiful restaurants can reinforce is subtler: a vision of what it means to live in the Bay Area.
When we’re swept up in the beautiful urbanity of a place like Boulevard or Mourad, we soak up the energy of a city, yet we’re kept at a distance from the crowd around us, too, which is a luxury in itself, as any afterwork N Judah rider would attest.
Personally, I feel particularly San Franciscan in restaurants like Foreign Cinema or Mister Jiu’s, my last stop, surrounded by clean light and unstructured comfort. Like the best Northern California spaces, Brandon Jew’s Chinatown restaurant is warm but not suffocating, urbane without ostentation. To eat at Mister Jiu’s, with its great brass lights and second-floor view of the balconies over Grant Street, is to feel a part of a place. It amplifies what I love about the city and makes me feel like my presence reflects it, too. Perhaps that’s the greatest act of imagination a room can inspire.