Leading restaurant designer Adam Tihany opened last night’s Pratt Institute panel on the affinities between interiors, design, and food with some reminiscences: “Andy Warhol couldn’t get into my first restaurant and that’s how I became famous. Like everything in New York, it happened because of someone else’s misery.” After the audience issued a collective giggle, fellow panelists, devoted Tihany clients, and renowned chefs Daniel Boulud (he of Café Boulud, Boulud Sud, and Daniel fame) and Lydia Shire (the cook and restaurateur behind Scampo Boston, Seasons, and Maison Robert) assured attendees that, in fact, Tihany’s success has even more to do with his talent for creating atmospheres and ambiance that reflect the passions and menus of his clients.
“The three pillars of a successful restaurant are food, service, and design,” said Tihany, as the panelists and moderator Michael Boodro of Elle Décor waded through the intricacies of designing and operating a fine dining establishment. “The food should drive the style of the restaurant,” added Shire. The rest of the conversation had more to do with details like the drape of tablecloths, the modulation of lighting, and the choice of materials for furniture. What might seem like minutia is actually essential to the success of a restaurant, noted Tihany: “Restaurants are about control — of people in space, of their experience. It’s not about reality, it’s about the perception of reality.” To that point, he stressed that being a restaurateur and a restaurant designer comes down to understanding human psychology.
The question-and-answer session that followed the discussion produced some of the evening’s most curious commentaries on the crossbreeding of the food and design industries. When asked about the New Americana trend in New York dining, nobody seemed impressed. Boulud pointed out that it’s annoying to try to read a menu in fine-print cursive under low light and against the background of a dark, wooden table. Tihany, with his signature irony, went so far as to predict the trend’s downfall: “They’re going to run out of Edison bulbs sooner or later,” he quipped. Shire, for her part, did not so much decry urban gardens as speak to their irrelevance — with so much high-quality produce grown in the Northeast, it makes no sense to attach a garden to one’s restaurant (nor does the New York real estate market allow for the necessary space, everyone agreed). The observations were especially interesting, given that the panel was held on the border of Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill and Fort Greene neighborhoods, where New Americana is practically indigenous cuisine.
It became obvious as the evening wore on that Tihany, Boulud, and Shire frequent not only their own restaurants, but also the most talked-about dining establishments in New York City — both as devoted foodies and as devotees of restaurant design. Thus, when ARTINFO saw Tihany and Shire leaving the reception that followed with a group of friends, we were eager to know where they planned to get dinner. They slipped away before we got an answer, but we’ll venture to say that there were probably no rustic details in sight.
