Restaurant design: where form meets function

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

The Arizona Terrace is designed to resemble an Arizona room, a structure similar to a screened porch, which is often added to houses in that state. To create the same feeling, the design team left the ceiling open to the structure and suspended a trellis. Placing all the lighting above the trellis creates an effect similar to sunlight filtering though, Norman says.

The trend toward efficiency hasn't escaped Houston-based restaurant consultant Dick Huiras either. But he sees a trend away from high-tech interiors toward high-tech kitchens.

"The operator is willing to pay more for the high-tech equipment because the one ultimate goal has been to reduce labor," he says.

Huiras agrees with Norman about emphasizing flexibility in the concept too, so that the interior can be updated periodically.

"Every decor outdates itself at sometime," he explains. "And every restaurant should redo itself at least every five years.

"People migrate toward success. If there is a new interior or even new colors, people will think to themselves `This place must be doing realy well,'" he says. "It creates a new image."

All agree, however, that even a great interior can't make up for bad food.

"Customers are much too sophisticated to be fooled," Bill Aumiller observes. "They will come back two or three times if they like the decor, hoping the food or service will improve. But the food should be the No. 1 priority."

The real danger of a beautiful interior coupled with so-so food, Huiras says, is that people will start encouraging their friends to go see the restaurant rather than to go eat in it.

"Once a large portion of the population has seen your design, you'll have nobody coming back if the service and food quality levels aren't high," he emphasizes.

Customers fall into three categories, Huiras says, when it comes to design: a group that loves it, a group that likes it and a group that doesn't like it.

"But all three groups will come back," he says, "as long as the food and service are good."

Mark Knauer, founder and owner of Knauer Inc. in Highland Park, Ill., says he is currently working on a lobster house called Rooney's, which is designed so that the private dining room can be opened up into the main dining room during peak hours but closed off for special events.

"That way people don't feel like second-class citizens if they're seated there on Saturday night," he explains. "It feels like the main dining room."

Knauer -- whose company has worked on more than 300 restaurants and hotels, including Harry Caray's, Trattoria No. 10, Gibson's, the Old Carolina Crab House, Baja Beach Club and Burhop's Restaurant -- is busy developing a restaurant-convenience store combination to be placed in office buildings. That market, he thinks, is a special and growing one.

"No one has been able to meet that market," he observes. "So many of these places have been designed to meet the egos of the developers but not the needs of the people who work there."

Knauer is designing the operation for a restaurateur who already operates two of them and has three more on the boards.