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Distilled Baltic: Celebrating the austere elegance of the Baltic and the roughness of early nineteenth-century London, this restaurant is built with a strange, imaginative recipe - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2002 by Penny McGuire

Baltic, a new Polish restaurant on Blackfriars Road in south London, very near Tate Britain, was initially designed with customary elegance, and feeling for space, by Seth Stein Architects, and subsequently executed with Drury Browne Architects. The client is Jan Woroniecki, who is also the proprietor of another Polish restaurant, Wodka in Kensington, known for delicately flavoured vodkas.

Behind the facade of an early nineteenth-century terrace, Baltic has been fitted into a supremely awkward site, shaped on plan like a chopping knife, with its handle pointing towards the road. The premises were once occupied by a coach building firm and when they were acquired by Woroniecki, the derelict and abandoned garage was found to be full of vintage Citroens.

In spite of - or indeed perhaps because of - its awkwardness, the site's shape lent itself to division into different areas, and to spatial drama. From the street, you enter a long, low corridor, its linearity emphasized, in a passing reference to Richard Serra, by the monolithic lacquered steel bar running down the south wall. At the far end, this dimly lit corridor compresses itself so that your emergence into a luminous skylit dining room is all the more striking. This is a tranquil lofty space, white-painted, lined down each wall with illuminated rendered alcoves and upholstered benches.

A slight change in level, for the floor of the dining room lies below that of the entrance, is dealt with by a shallow ramp. Before the ramp, there is an intermediate room, between bar and dining room, illuminated by a deep lightwell.

In designing his own house in London's fashionable Kensington (AR October 1996), Seth Stein worked with existing structures, expressing their textures, imperfections and odd angles, making old and new coexisting but distinct. Here too, the architects have adopted the same approach. Apart from wooden roof trusses and rooflights, few original features remained, but within the dining room, a clear sense of the original building is gained from the architects' expression of the trusses, and of structural irregularities and junctions. In the bar/eating area, luminance picks up the texture and colour of an old brick wall.

A Baltic theme runs like a continuous thread through the building. Colours - washed out putty, grey, green - are those of the northern seas. In the bar/eating room, lumps of Baltic amber suspended on silvery fibre-optic strands and fashioned into a hanging light, are gold against the pink brick. Both ends of the bar are enclosed in illuminated translucent panels filled with glowing amber chips.