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Design on the Menu

Five restaurants where architecture and design have made a big impression

Orrery, Kings Road, London, 1954

Terence Conran designed the interior and made the furniture in his own workshop. Images courtesy of the Conran Archive at the Design Museum

When the 23-year-old Terence Conran first saw a vacant shop at the scruffier end of London’s Kings Road in Chelsea, he considered using it as a showroom for his furniture business, which would one day reach as far as shops in Seoul and Tokyo. But he chose instead to open a restaurant that he called Orrery. It was named for a mechanical model of the solar system given to him by his parents, and he would use it again many years later for another restaurant that would earn a Michelin star.

The menu at the first Orrery, given that Britain was still subject to the food rationing that had been introduced during the Second World War, could only be simple. But the interior, with blown-up Victorian engravings and hanging planes suspended from the ceiling, was inspired by what he had seen helping his friend and tutor from Central School of Arts and Crafts, Eduardo Paolozzi, and artist Richard Hamilton create exhibitions and interiors for the newly founded Institute of Contemporary Art.

Alexander Girard designed every inch of La Fonda del Sol, except the furniture. His friends Charles and Ray Eames did a special chair for him.

La Fonda del Sol, Time & Life Building, New York, 1960

The Time & Life Building is a 48-floor tower that completed the Rockefeller Center 30 years after work started on the project, a complex of high-rise towers and public spaces. Henry Luce’s Time & Life magazine publishing business included Fortune, the magazine for which George Nelson, the creative director for Herman Miller, worked. And it was Nelson who played an important part in fitting out the building.

Girard was never afraid of using strong colours. Images courtesy of the Alexander Girard Archive, Vitra Design Museum

His friends Ray and Charles Eames worked on the furniture of the lobbies for the company’s magazines, and Alexander Girard, who was responsible for Herman Miller’s textiles—and later gave Braniff the most distinctive corporate identity any airline has ever had—designed a restaurant in the building. He did the interiors, the graphics, and the cutlery, while the Eameses created their La Fonda chair for him.

Caption: Girard was never afraid of using strong colours. Images courtesy of the Alexander Girard Archive, Vitra Design Museum

The Four Seasons restaurant. Photography: Victoria Hely-Hutchinson

The Four Seasons, Seagram Building, New York, 1959

Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, trained as an architect and was responsible for persuading her father to use Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building. This was Mies’s first chance to realise the idea of a glass tower set on an urban plaza. It became a model followed—mainly with rather less success—around the world.

Pan American Building Dinner, Four Seasons, menu. Credit: The Culinary Institute of America

At the foot of the building, Mies left space for two restaurants. The most famous of them, The Four Seasons, was designed by Mies’s one-time champion, Philip Johnson, with whom he later fell out. Johnson, for all his faults (which included leaving his role as the Museum of Modern Art’s first curator of architecture to spend two years as a full-time organiser of an American fascist party), succeeded in creating one of New York’s great interiors.

There was an ambitious art programme for the restaurant. There was a piece by James Rosenquist. The stage curtain that Picasso painted for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes hung on one wall. Mark Rothko accepted a commission to paint a series of murals but decided, having had dinner in the restaurant, to withdraw. “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kinds of prices will never look at a painting of mine,” he later told his studio assistant. It did not deter President Kennedy from celebrating his birthday there. Emil Antonucci’s logotype and menu design survived a sequence of changes in ownership.

El Bulli's original interior was simple,the food, however, was anything butsimple. Copyright and photographyEl Bulli Foundation Archive

El Bulli, Catalonia, Spain, 1964

Adrià devised pictograms to describe his approach for the menu for Richard Hamilton's dinner discussing food and its connection to art. Pictograms designed by Marta Méndez Blaya. Copyright and photography: El Bulli Foundation Archive

Ferran Adrià closed El Bulli, his restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean, in 2011. But his radical experiment with food and the experience of eating in the restaurant is still talked about. Adrià could be said to have completely redesigned food, by going back to first principles to create textures and flavours with little connection to traditional cuisines.

El Bulli was not a place in which the menu was a document that you used to make a choice of dishes to eat. It was more like the catalogue that an art gallery might give you. Each meal was a performance, reflected in the menu. Adrià’s menus were small format, with very little in the way of seduction. The pertinent example is from October 2004 and describes a €145 dinner prepared by Adrià with the winemaker Telmo Rodriguez.

In the summer of 2008, Adrià organised a dinner at the restaurant at which a group including Vicente Todolí, former director of Tate Modern, the artist Richard Hamilton, and a group of artists and chefs discussed the relationship between food and art.

Studio David Thulstrup and local manufacturer Brdr Krüger furnished the interior. Photography: Søren Aagaard

Noma, Copenhagen, 2003

Since René Redzepi opened the doors to the original Noma in 2003, in what would become a milestone for Danish gastronomy, the restaurant—not content with earning three Michelin stars—has also been named as the Best Restaurant in the world.

Its original location was in Standgade 93, a warehouse on the waterfront in Christianshavn, Copenhagen, which closed after 63 of 435 diners became ill from a chef spreading norovirus. In 2018, Noma relocated to an urban farm just outside the city, working with Bjarke Ingels and his architecture firm BIG to transform a former Danish navy ammunition store into a culinary haven.

Vegetable season runs from June to September and no meat is served in the duration. Photography Ditte Isager

With only 40 seats, including reserved spots for students, Noma is intimate and relaxed despite its intimidating track record. Studio David Thulstrup and local manufacturer Brdr Krüger worked to furnish it with the specially made ARV chair and table. Noma trained some of the most accomplished chefs of a generation, who have gone on to establish their own restaurants in Copenhagen and beyond.

Aiming to revive the authentic use of local ingredients and cooking methods, Noma's menu reflects its commitment to seasonal and local ingredients, divided into three themes that showcase the best of each season—from Scandinavian shellfish to vegetables and game. After 20 years, Noma will close after its winter 2024 season and transform into a test kitchen, Noma Projects, with a pop-up restaurant and online service.

This piece was published in Anima Issue 2, purchase a copy or subscribe here