Good design reflects restaurant's location, concept, menu

Nation's Restaurant News, Sept 2, 1985 by Adam Tihany

Completed 50 years ago during the darkest days of the Depression, Rockefeller Center remains one of the greatest urban mixed-use developments ever built.

Today developers, planners and designers continue to look at this Art Deco monument to commerce and recreation as the ultimate example of its type. So it is significant that the first major alteration of the center's original scheme did not involve its office buildings or its shops and galleries. Instead it addressed the center's restaurant complex.

Although the original restaurants probably were successful by most standards, Rockefeller Center Corp. and operator Restaurant Associates felt they needed changing for two reasons. They had ceased to live up to their extraordinary location on the perimeter of the center's famous skating rink, and they did not offer the variety of menu, stmospher and prices that the center had come to demand.

So in place of the old Promenade Cafe and an all-but-hidden coffee shop, they set out to install an up-to-the-minute, multifaceted operation. Opened in June 1984, the new complex, called the Rockefeller Plaza, is the result of about five years' worth of planning and construction.

Two highly respected design professionals, architects John Portman of Atlanta and Philip George of Harper and George in New York, contributed to the final design plan. And the total project, including a renovated interior concourse, is said to have consumed about $27 million.

The first lesson of restaurant design is that good design goes hand-in-hand with all other operational considerations. Successful design reflects and reinforces a restaurant's location, concept, menu and prices. The first requirement of restaurants located within mixed-use developments is that they work both as individual entities and as elements of a larger whole. Judged on the basis of those counts, the restaurants at Rockefeller Plaza achieve mixed results.

Individually, the designs of the three new restaurants, American Festival Cafe, the SeaGrill and Savories, do a lot of things right. Each interior, for example, reflects that restaurant's menu and marketing approach. Design was no afterthought here. And each reflects a very professional concern for quality materials and adequate budget and attention to detail.

As part of a greater whole, however, the restaurants both separately and collectively seem less than what might have been. According to Restaurant Associates vice president Nick Valenti, the design goal for the new complex was to create restaurants that would be memorable but essentially complementary to what lay outside.

The result is a sort of contemporary all-American esthetic combining lots of brass and plate glass with warm woods and luxurious marbles. All three restaurants are essentially upbeat, attractive spaces. But they are anonymous, too, and unless you are facing one of the newly enlarged windows, it is easy to forget you are dining someplace more than just another attractive restaurant anywhere in America.

Except for the interior column dimensions and the American Festival Cafe's mock-Fiestaware china, little of Rockefeller Center's rich and cohesive design scheme has made it into those spaces.

From the standpoint of design, perhaps most disappointing of all is the below-ground interior corridor that encircles the complex on three sides. An expansion and renovation of that cooridor was obviously an important and clever part of the center's upgrading program: It provides circulation among the individual parts of the complex into the rest of Rockefeller Center, and it should have been the most natural link between Rockefeller Center and the restaurant complex.

But the white marble passageway is sterile and forbidding. Visible from the restaurants through a curving glass wall, the brightly lit corridor becomes starkly intrusive on the restaurants at night, its glare robbing the dining area of any sense of evening intimacy. Although a great part of the budget was obviously spent here on marble detailing, brass fixtures and hundreds of panels of curved glass, among other things, the corridor's ceiling has been left virtually unfinished.

Considering that the complex is located in the very center of one of the finest examples of Art Deco architecture in this country, a design scheme more constant with that enduringly popular style would seem to have made a gret deal of sense. Restaurants are a single, important element in the complex commercial organisms we call mixed-use developments.

Continuing Rockefeller Center's dominant esthetic style into those interiors would seem to have been a good way of reinforcing their relationship to the larger center and stay impregnated visually in the memories of the thousands of people visiting the center each day.