BUDDAKAN & MORIMOTO
It was with great excitement that the NYU Restaurateur Club visited two more of Starr Restaurant Group’s New York properties last week. Having experienced The Clocktower’s remarkable dining rooms, we approached these restaurants with an eye for design, and found the pair to be full of the new and grand and strange. We came with an understanding that Starr Restaurants aim to capture their diners like an audience, with stunning performances of hospitality and design innovation.
We began the evening on a high note at Morimoto, a truly beautiful and well-crafted Japanese restaurant. The dining room played host to many inventive design techniques: its glass dividers sectioned the room without sectioning the light, concrete columns to nowhere gave an industrial feel to the otherwise glossy atmosphere, and the muted blue lights reflected a sense of the menu’s oceanic origins. The walls and ceiling looked, at first glance, to be draped with heavy white curtains, but upon closer inspection it was clear that the rippling design had been molded in plaster. It evoked gentle waves and a sense of calm. In the center of the room, thousands of small glass water bottles were fastened neck to neck in perfect rows to make what amiable manager Tim Cho called the “water wall.” It was an ingenuous combination of artpiece, screen, and, with its impressive height, room-lengthening optical illusion.
The water wall stemmed from the underground level of the restaurant, where the glass-bottle theme was continued artistically behind the bar of the lounge. The basement, the manager explained on our tour, served triple purpose as an upscale cocktail bar, overflow seating for high-volume evenings, and a dimmer, more romantic setting for date night. Even in the bathrooms, we could see deliberate design--there were classic Japanese toilets, beautifully simple countertops, and decorated mirrors reflective of the season. Indeed, the minimalist color palette brought such a muted cohesion to the room that it would be easy for a diner to let food and hospitality take center stage.
Morimoto’s staff were incredibly generous to offer us a taste of each of those key elements. They had prepared a sampling plate of sushi for us to try, along with their house-made soy sauce. It was both delicious and exceedingly hospitable, as we had neither paid for any such luxury nor asked for anything beyond their time. Tim extended his demonstration of exceptional hospitality by answering all of our questions and showing us anything we wished to see. Notably, he showed us how the restaurant staff recognize and handle a critic, how the ticket manager coordinates the timing of three different kitchens, and how eponymous star Chef Morimoto polishes his own rice on site. Our experience at Morimoto was, altogether, how Starr Restaurant’s strategy should be employed.
Our tour of Buddakan was remarkably different, even when it was structured the same way and contained the same general elements. A manager welcomed us into the restaurant, explained its design, and even let us taste its famous edamame dumplings. They were wonderful, and an understandable reason for the restaurant’s success.
Where Morimoto’s atmosphere had been decidedly Japanese cuisine-focused, Buddakan attempted to cater to everyone. Lights dimmed to near blackness and bass-heavy music gave the restaurant a nightclub ambiance. The famous stairs into the cavernous dining room served as a good vantage point for photographs of the chandeliers. That grandiose aspect of design was one of few consistencies across the restaurant: everything from the chandeliers to the chair leg carvings to the bird-shaped candlesticks was overwrought. Famed critics have described the decor as evoking an old Chinese mansion. Many images of Buddha were juxtaposed with enormous European paintings of nude figures (a renaissance-era technique for showing divine purity). Combined, they did give the restaurant a complex cross-cultural atmosphere of nobility. Some in our group saw it as a way to make european diners feel more included in the otherwise Asian-fusion environment.
Both Morimoto and Buddakan certainly employ the tactic of capturing prospective guests’ attention through theatrical design. The NYU Restaurateur Club now knows that sometimes, the result is fantastic, but it can also be stilted. The overarching company’s aesthetic and target audience is surely more in line with Morimoto’s approach, but our tour of both restaurants and our discussions with their managers illustrated the importance of a great design. It is the look of a restaurant, after all, that sets the tone of a dining experience when a guest walks in the the door.