If you want to sell more food and drinks, you need a restaurant or bar design that suits your punters and the environment that surrounds it. Hospitality chats to the designers and owners of venues that do just that.
 
By Ann Pistacchi

“There are four key components to running any successful bar or restaurant,” says designer Richard Dalman. “Your product (i.e., the food and drink you are serving), service, marketing, and the environment which you’ve created with your décor. You might be able to get away with one of these not being up to scratch, but any more than that and your business is probably going to go under.”
Dalman’s job is to help business owners get the environment portion of this equation right. He’s been specialising in bar, restaurant and hotel design and refurbishments for over twenty years, and has seen countless domestic and international design trends come and go. He says that while “trends are important,” he feels “it is much more important to design what is appropriate for a bar and restaurant in the position that it is in and for the clientele that they serve” than to create “carbon copies of what is hip and trendy elsewhere.”
“I think that is actually a trend,” Dalman says. “Being authentic to where you are, what you are, and who you want to attract is sort of an anti-trend, trend.”

Being authentic to your setting
According to Dalman, the trend towards ‘authenticity of place’ started in the hotel industry and is now trickling down to bar and restaurant design. He says being authentic to your establishment’s location means representing – or “talking to” – the physical place your bar, restaurant or hotel is located in. This translates in the bar and restaurant Dalman designed for the Scenic Hotels Te Waonui Forest Retreat Hotel in Franz Josef to a bar on the ground floor that has a “dark, moody, atmospheric feel” appropriate to a venue located at root level in the bush, and a restaurant located on the first floor amongst the tree tops that is “light, bright and airy.”
This move towards authenticity doesn’t have to be as extreme as creating a coal-face bar to reflect the West Coast mining near Franz Josef. Johnny de Monchy, co-owner of the award winning Agents & Merchants in Auckland, says that although they went with a French Colonial theme in general for the establishment, the owners made a conscious effort to reflect the history of the bar’s location. “Britomart has been operating as a transit region since the mid 1800s,” he says, “and that influenced our choice to hang art which pays homage to what has happened historically in this district.”

Being authentic to your product
Being authentic to the food and drink you are serving is relatively straightforward if you are designing an Indian or Thai restaurant, but slightly more ambiguous when you are serving more general cuisine. Dalman says this is when designers really need to depend on the brief they get from their clients. “We have to depend on owners and chefs to know what kind of food they want to serve and exactly who their clientele will be.”
One of Dalman Architecture’s triumphs in this area is the five-star Pescatore Restaurant in Christchurch. From the stark white ante-room where guests are greeted, to the lush detail in the dining room - everything about the design of Pescatore acts as an homage to Chef Andrew Brown’s innovative cuisine.
“The food Andrew creates is not only exceptionally good, it is unique. Guests at his restaurant are not in for a ‘normal’ dining experience. We needed to reflect this in Pescatore’s design.”
One thing Brown knew he wanted was a space where guests could be offered a glass of champagne and a palate cleanser. Dalman says, “We then took that idea one step further and decided instead of giving guests just a palate cleanser, we would give them an all body and soul cleanser. We wanted to cleanse the senses of the guests and clear all of their preconceptions of what the dining experience is all about because what they get in Andrew’s dining room will be different from anything else they have experienced before.”
Dalman did this by creating an all-white room complete with hard, slightly uncomfortable seating and a gigantic oversized chandelier. “We don’t want people to feel totally comfortable in the ante-room,” Dalman says. “We want patrons to feel a little bit on edge and for the adrenaline to be pumping as they wait to go through the sheer drapes into the main dining room.”
Once guests go through to the main dining room at Pescadore “the colours are softer and the furniture comfortable. The food in the restaurant becomes the most important thing. The white table tops which appear to be floating above the black carpet become a blank canvas upon which Andrew does his art – which is his food.”

Being authentic to your clientele
Agents and Merchants is a four-time Lewisham award winning bar for a reason – it knows how to appeal to its clientele. Whether they are serving an Allpress coffee and pastry to a Britomart local at 7am, a white wine lunch to business partners making a deal at noon, or a mojito to a twenty-something looking for a good time and hip company at 1am, de Monchy and his partners know how to please.
“I’ve had few successful breakfast experiences in a bar environment,” de Monchy says. “It just doesn’t feel right to be having a bagel in the same place I go to drink. Because of that we’re very conscious about staying away from a full-breakfast market.”

Instead takeaway coffee, pastries and baguettes are served from a bar on Roukai Lane from 7am to “raise visibility with the locals,” lunch is served from 11am, and the venue transitions to a bar at 3pm. “We have to cater to different people who see our venue in a different light,” de Monchy says, “People who come here Friday for lunch have probably never been here at one in the morning and vice versa. They all need to feel like they are getting the experience they are looking for.”

Being authentic to your vision
“Of course there will always be restaurants and bars that are designed like stage sets,” Dalman says. “There is a place for themed restaurants and bars and many of them work well, but designing these venues comes from a completely different mindset.”
De Monchy agrees, but says there is something to be said for not over-theming. Reviewers have described his Racket Bar as having a “Cuban-style atmosphere,” but de Monchy says this is really only seen in the way the venue pays homage to their extensive selection of Cuban rums. “Cuban themed establishments have a habit of blatantly reinforcing their theme through populist images of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Racket bar is probably more 'shabby chic' or reflective of an environment that you genuinely may find in Havana as opposed to a more generic 'Cuba via the lonely planet' themed establishment."
Dalman says, “Really it all comes down to the bottom line. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to design your venue to suit your vision and your patrons. Ultimately patrons have to feel comfortable in the atmosphere you’re serving them in.”