‘Great Spaces’--the Architects of Dining in L.A. : ‘We need gathering places, catalysts for the unexpected encounter,’ says one architect

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.

--Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities”

When a restaurant “works,” chances are that most happy customers don’t analyze why. A couple of apercus might be tossed about in the car: The food was delicious, the service was good.

Rarely, though, do we scrutinize how the physical environment contributes to having a good time. Great spaces tend to transmit their magic subliminally. The magic is no accident, though; more often than not, it’s the result of an architect’s canny, precisely engineered dream.

Los Angeles has never lacked restaurants that functioned as gathering places. In fact, whole eras might be documented simply by doing an oral history of Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, Ma Maison, Ben Frank’s, Canter’s and the Source. But the crowd of high-spirited, great-looking restaurants that’s sprung up in the last few years has reached a sort of critical mass. It has been about more than just fabulous food, and it has gone beyond merely mirroring the ripening of Los Angeles. Restaurant culture has come to have an impact on the city’s creative energy in itself.

“Los Angeles is in its growth mode in every area, from the most physical to the most metaphysical,” says architect Michael Rotondi. “This place is a creative catalyst now. The city’s filled with adventurous people who need a lot of stimulation. I think restaurants have really been one of the critical ingredients to this consummation of society.”

While much was made of the “restaurant as theater” metaphor several years ago--the venue as a high-toned place to see and be seen--every architect we spoke with pointed out that two gods must be obeyed: Dining out must offer simultaneously a sense of being in a public realm and a sense of privacy. The ritual of Going Out to Eat, while including relaxing, recharging and smooching under candlelight, is also about collective experience, about recognizing and being with a community.

New York Times restaurant critic Bryan Miller has called big-city restaurants “living rooms for the middle class.” Do the new restaurants in Los Angeles really serve as living rooms?

Los Angeles architect Elyse Grinstein thinks so. “When you go into a restaurant, you should feel it’s your own special place, as if you were entertaining in your own home. I love walking into West Beach and feeling it’s my place. Or into Chaya or Musso’s. I feel like I belong all over town.”

This feeling of belonging may have a special importance in Los Angeles, where what sociologists call face-to-face interaction occurs far less frequently than in more compact, traditionally organized cities. Many of the architects agree.

“I don’t think we need any more ultra-turbocharged, overly architectonic space,” says Steven Ehrlich. “We need gathering places, catalysts for the unexpected encounter. That’s what urbanism is all about, and restaurants serve that function in L.A.”

If restaurants are “living rooms,” they’re the kind you’d find on stage. The diner is simultaneously in the play and part of the audience. Without the small-town village green, the line of front porches or, for most people, the rarefied private club, restaurants offer a sort of instant “membership” in an unchartered, but very real, society--at least for as long as you’re there.

It’s emblematic that one of the last decade’s most vigorous dialogues (in the film “My Dinner With Andre”) took place on a restaurant banquette. Booths are one way many architects are structuring space for that perfect private/public fit. That was the reason for the booths at Kate Mantilini’s, says Michael Rotondi. It’s the raison d’etre behind the three types of booths at Maple Drive (typical ones in the cocktail bar, semi-private ones, and one booth for eight, like a complete little room), and for the six-person slide-in-from-both-sides booths at the new Broadway Deli. Booths offer a way to hold court with a bit of elbow room, have a private party with ready-made energy, talk to a spouse you haven’t seen all week while “going out,” or do that public restaurant display: smooch.

To rank as a community base, a restaurant need not be smart-looking or expensive. (The funky, vernacular spot can be wonderful--and wonderfully ironic--in the post-modern sense. Notice how many of the architects interviewed mention going to “joints.”) Nevertheless, a number of interwoven elements now lead diners to expect a new restaurant’s aesthetic presentation to be as clever as the food.

Visual sophistication is a given in Los Angeles, as it is in other major American cities. But there are two elements of what I call “restaurant intelligence” that are peculiar to Los Angeles. They’re nothing new; in fact, they’re both stereotypes the city’s been saddled with. Scrutinized more closely, though, they illuminate the prevalence and the pleasure of the architected venues.

Take Los Angeles as Industry Town first. In addition to the carefully orchestrated look of many filmland folks and the interplay between moneyed producer-collectors, museums and the art works that hang on restaurant walls, there’s also something dead center at the Life/Art intersection that anthropologist Edmund Carpenter calls “becoming what you behold.” A great number of people in this town are paid to think about “the visuals” 18 hours a day. So when it’s time to go out to eat, one expects an environment as craftily crafted as a Ralph Lauren ad, as engaging as the next great looking art-directed 35-millimeter scene.

One other sense that’s scarcely mentioned is where the second stereotype comes in. In addition to being a city high on images, Los Angeles is known as the Body Metropolis, where personal trainers purportedly reign. Now, you know as well as I do that everybody here isn’t an Arnold S. or Jane F. Still, the general kinesthetic and haptic intelligence--the bodily experiences of three-dimensional space and touch--is particularly developed in this town. People who hike, jog, work out at clubs and, in short, pay an unusual degree of attention to their bodily sensations tend to be acutely sensitive to how a chair fits and how a room feels . Consider that the new restaurants are vortices not only of community but of heightened physical experience.

Aesthetic and social demands create interesting problems for architects to solve. Invention and comfort are twin challenges. “A space should engage you, challenge and sometimes confront you,” says Rotondi.

“I try to pull all the functional elements apart, expose them into bits and pieces so they’re part of the interest,” adds Josh Schweitzer. As his ex-partner David Kellen puts it, “Some people want total comfort, but I think with pure comfort you miss a lot. You go somewhere to eat special food. Well, the space should wake you up, give you a little tweak too.”

Although architects often play a significant role in shaping the look of a place, it’s frequently the restaurateur who sets the tone by dreaming up the precise combination of decor, service and food, all oriented for a certain clientele. Each of the architects we spoke with underscored the collaborative nature of the months-long design process and the importance of their client’s creative input.

Rotondi was explicit about this. “Angeli Caffe came out of very specific discussions with Evan (Kleiman) and John (Stroebel). In the same way, 72 Market was the result of working with Tony Bill and Julie Stone, and Kate Mantilini’s with Marilyn Lewis. A client needs to be compelled to do a restaurant, to be more than a lawyer or doctor in need of a tax shelter. When we find a client with interesting ideas, we’ll start designing restaurants again.”

While it’s no longer the era of, say, La Coupole in Paris in the ‘20s or Max’s Kansas City circa 1966, when artists traded work for meals, the architects have a simpatico feeling for the food their restaurant colleagues produce. Environment and cuisine play off one another in place after place.

“It’s really helpful when I have a chance to taste the food before doing the work,” says David Kellen. “I’d have to say that eating Mary Sue (Miliken) and Susan’s (Feniger) food at City inspired me. With Fama, though I hadn’t tasted the menu, I had eaten at Rockenwagner and had a feeling for the very personal, eclectic quality of the Italian food Hans (Rockenwagner) was going to do.”

“There must absolutely be an integration of cuisine and design,” says Tony Greenberg, “but it’s not like Italian food equals Chianti bottle and red-checked table cloth. It’s often a two-way street. With Maple Drive, Leonard Schwartz was involved with the design from the inception and I was familiar with his food.”

Designing a restaurant may be compelling but it’s no, well, picnic. “Each eating experience contains roots and layers of information,” says Michele Saee. “I really respect the type of food being served and the importance of its context. Although I enjoy the food at the places I’ve designed, I usually don’t want to go there for a few months after they’ve opened; I see all the small details that could have been different, and remember all the pain it took.”

Non-architect patrons may drink the atmosphere of a place through every pore, but they cannot imagine the sequence of decisions and irritations leading up to the Grand Opening. Rotondi sees restaurants differently from most “civilians.” “Architecture,” he says, “is really a physical journal of a period of time, documenting all the mental and emotional activity that went into making it.”

But don’t discount the fun. Kellen says that the best part about doing a restaurant is frequenting it after the work is done. “With an office space, you can’t hang out there just because you like it. With residential work, I can’t simply step into a client’s house on a Sunday night and say, ‘I’d like to sit in your living room for a while.’ But in the case of a restaurant, I can seriously use the place for a period of time.”

One more thing. Just in case you’re thinking all the great-looking restaurants are about Creativity, Community and Good Eats, don’t forget that Ayn Rand’s stupendously self-confident hero of “The Fountainhead,” Howard Roark, was not an accountant or a dentist but an architect. Listen to Tony Greenberg, designer of Maple Drive.

“Maple Drive? It’s my favorite place to eat in the world. I go there not for the food or the service or the scene but for gratifying my ego. Any time I need to get puffed up, I go there for lunch. As Tony Bill told me, I’m a ‘black hole for compliments.’ ”