Restaurant design: where form meets function

Nation's Restaurant News, Nov 26, 1990 by Tracey Woodard

Restaurant design: Where form meets function

Versatility and efficiency are the key buzzwords in restaurant design as operators strive to keep up with the ever-changing market

Flexibility and efficiency in both design and concept were identified by a group of this country's top architects and consultants as the key trends in restaurant design today.

"The trend is toward function," says Bill Aumiller, co-owner of Aumiller Youngquist in Mount Prospect, Ill., the design firm that has done 30 Lettuce Entertain You restaurants, including Scoozi!, The Eccentric, Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba!, Hat Dance and Ed Debevic's. "Owners are seeing that they have to utilize the space to make profits.

"That means they can't depend just on lunch or just on dinner. They want to be able to rent the restaurant out on Sunday."

"Restaurateurs want the ability to handle parties, too," says Aumiller's partner, Keith Youngquist. "They also like the ability to shut down part of the restaurant on a slow night."

The trends are apparent in Phoenix, where Neal Norman, an associate with Cornoyer-Hedrick Architects and Planners Inc., has designed two sets of restaurants that share kitchens.

The first, a tapas restaurant called La Tasca, is situated adjacent to a food court in a shopping mall. Norman and his associates created a design that allowed the restaurant to operate a food court concession as well as a full-service restaurant from the same kitchen.

More recently, Cornoyer-Hedrick designed Arizona Terrace and Cafe 66, two Big 4-operated restaurants in a Phoenix mixed-use development. The restaurants, though diverse in concept, share the same kitchen.

"Restauranteurs are looking at it [design] more from a space-planning and economics standpoint," Norman explains. "You have to be superefficient to be competitive."

"It's important to the owner to be able to manipulate through the market as the market changes," remarks Julius Van Heek, vice president of the design division of The Gettys Group Inc. in Chicago. "In the bar area and the banquet area and the private dining rooms, you have to be able to create space."

Van Heek notes that his company uses curtains and frosted glass rather than dry wall to create more intimate spaces.

The change in attitude, Youngquist said, result from the downsizing trends.

"The mega restaurants are becoming more the exception rather than the rule," he says. "Instead of 350 seats, they're down to 170 to 180 seats."

And instead of having 40 seats strictly used for bar customers, many restaurants are now creating a hybrid cafe area that serves bar and restaurant patrons.

At Capucino in Cambridge, Mass., the pair created a bar that seats only eight, but the restaurant also includes a cafe area that seats 35 to 40.

"People can come in and sit at a table and order a cocktail or drinks and an appetizer," Aumiller says. "It's extremely popular, and I think it's a coming trend.

"The other advantage is at lunch, when a restaurant may do only half the business," Youngquist adds. "In that case you can open just the cafe area. It's less formal and more suited to lunch."

When the Gettys Group started work on the sixth Connie's Pizza outlet in Aurora, Ill., they divided the 11,500-square-foot restaurant into five areas: the bar 36 seats, the cafe with 90 seats, the piazza with 60 seats, the back dining room with 74 seats and a banquet room that seats up to 130 and can be divided into thirds.

So a total of 400 seats are dispersed among the areas that feature a custom-designed fountain (which also helps with sound control, Van Heek says) and a 60-foot mural of the Grand Canal of Venice. Van Heek notes that map tables encourage families to gather round and discuss places they want to go and places they've been.

"It's a large restaurant about an hour outside of Chicago," he explains, "so we have to make sure that the locals keep coming back and back and back. Using different elements and different room offers a different experience and keeps them coming back."

Flexibility of the concept, rather than the structure, was a priority when Cornoyer-Hedrick created Big 4's latest venture, Aldo Baldo.

The firm built the Italian restaurant around a fictional character, Aldo Baldo, who is described as an adventurer who has lived throughout time. Credited with inventing everything that has ever been invented, Norman said, Baldo lends the ability to refresh the theme over time.

"We based it on the Italian futurism period," he says of the restaurant, which opened in October in the Scottsdale Fashion Square. "But it evolved beyond futurism to become more. The open kitchen runs the length of the restaurant and represents order.

"We credited Aldo Baldo with designing all the equipment in it. Throughout the remainder of the restaurant are sculptures that are fictitious inventions that have failed. That design represents chaos."

Cafe 66, on the other hand, is based on a different perspective of a rather common theme. The concept of a simple roadside diner is twisted slightly so that the restaurant actually becomes the highway. The floor is black concrete and covered with yellow paint stripes, while the perimeter is decorated with signs hanging from the ceiling. On the far wall, opposite the entrance, is a huge billboard.