Omido imports traditional touches from Japan for sushi spot

Nation's Restaurant News, Sept 22, 2008 by Elizabeth Licata

Times Square may be a lot of things--noisy, crowded, dirty, vibrant and exciting--but it's never tranquil. So when the former home of a quick-service chicken restaurant in that area became the site of chef Eiji "Taka" Takase's chic new sushi restaurant, the designers had to work overtime to create an atmosphere that would transport guests as far as possible from the commotion of Broadway.

"Once we demoed out the space and gave it a really thorough cleaning, it was a unique space," said Adam Farmerie, a founder and principal of AvroKO, a New York-based design firm. "But the space is not huge, and it's right on Broadway, so the biggest hurdle that we had to tackle was how to take a space that's right in the middle of Times Square and turn it into a sexy, tranquil sushi restaurant."

The inspiration for the concept's design came from its name, Omido, which is Japanese for "temple."

"But it can also mean house, like a small little house," Farmerie said. "So we thought we'd use both of those references and try to create a little warm wooden house in the middle of Times Square."

Several members of the AvroKO team traveled to Japan, allowing them to translate elements of the temples and houses they had visited into the restaurant, Farmerie said.

The walls and ceiling of the 65-seat restaurant are wrapped in 4-inch-wide planks of bamboo, so the warm color and texture create a cozy, quiet haven punctuated by Omido's artistic, custom-made lights. The modern glass globes dangle in neat lines from the ceiling, mimicking in glass the paper lanterns that are a familiar sight at shrines and traditional-style homes around Japan.

Beyond the main dining room, the minimal aesthetic gives way to "the big pop," Farmerie said. The back room features an immense ceiling installation of about 10,000 densely packed omikuji, or Japanese fortune papers. Fortune-telling is an important part of visiting shrines in Japan. People tell their fortunes by pulling a stick out of a large box. Each stick corresponds to a drawer full of fortune papers, which foretell varying degrees of good or bad luck. After reading the fortune, you tie it in a specific sort of knot on a tree, or on a display of jute lines designated by the temple for fortune-tying. The act of tying the omikuji exorcises bad fortunes and ensures that the good fortunes will come true.

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Acquiring the omikuji for Omido was a problem because temples won't sell them to people outside of Japan, Farmerie said. Luckily, there was a woman in their office whose parents live in Tokyo, so she had them order the papers from their local shrine and then send them to her in New York.

"Once we got them, about eight or nine of our crew went down to the jobsite and just tied omikuji for three or four days," Farmerie said. "It was pretty cool."

The densely packed paper ceiling is lit from behind so the whole installation has an unearthly white glow. The fortunes are written in green, and the light shining through the paper gives an eerie green cast to the room.

The fortune-telling theme continues in Omido's bathrooms, where the tiles are based on the shape of the drawers in which the omikuji are kept. The fortune paper drawers have consistent dimensions from temple to temple, Farmerie said, and he mimicked their shape in Omido's bathrooms to bring in that element of the Japanese shrine-going experience.

"Every single shrine you go to always has the same sort of drawers that are this size," Farmerie said. "So it becomes something you know about when you visit a shrine. It's part of the experience."

To recreate the "geometry of the experience," Omido's bathroom is covered in custom-made green glass blocks, like tiles, that are the exact size and shape of the fortune drawers.

"We just wrapped the space in these dark-green glass tiles that mimic the geometry of the temples," Farmerie said. "We usually tend to spend a lot of time designing the bathrooms in the restaurants that we do. For some reason we just obsess about bathrooms. It's so unexpected, because people usually cut money when it comes to the bathrooms. Whenever they're starting to slice the budget down, that's the place they try to cut from, but we always make sure that we make it memorable."

Omido's manager Christina Rim says the bathroom is her favorite part of the restaurant, even though the back room with the omikuji ceiling is really the showpiece of the restaurant.

"The atmosphere [in Omido] is really relaxing," she said. "We don't play the music too loud. It's sort of hip and loungey. The decor is all bamboo and Edison bulbs. Even though it's very minimalistic, there's a lot of warmth to it because everything is covered in wood."

The shrinelike atmosphere of the restaurant creates the ideal context for what chef Takase describes as his Shinto-inspired food.

"Shinto is the oldest religion in Japan," he said. "From my understanding, Shinto is about appreciating nature. My food philosophy is to appreciate nature. My food is very simple. We stick with what is traditional and give it a little touch of my style."