DBGB is Chef Daniel Boulud’s downtown place where the French brasserie meets the American tavern. The interior, by Thomas Schlesser of the firm Design Bureaux, Inc. ( Winner of Hospitality Design Best Casual Restaurant Design 2010) is inspired by the Bowery neighborhood of lower Manhattan, well-known for its industrial restaurant supply stores. Floor to ceiling shelving stocked with the restaurant’s own tools, tableware and dry goods overlook a partially open kitchen. Metal restaurant-supply-store shelving creates a hide-and-seek effect between banquettes and the dining room, the dining room and the open kitchen.
They are known for their 14 varieties of house-made sausages from the Merguez to the Vermont. There’s also seasonal Lyonnais inspired cooking alongside mouth watering burgers and towering shellfish platters. This is must-see place if you go to New York, it has many great food reviews.
The bar/café area is an abstraction of the combination of mirror, glass and text ubiquitous in the storefronts and interiors commonly found in cafés, brasseries and market stores. A collage of menu items interspersed with hundreds of quotes about food and drink are applied to three mirrored walls and the glass storefront giving the room a unique visual and spatial character which is simultaneously both old world and mid century pop.
The Dining Room takes its cue from historic kitchen supply stores. The space is defined by a free standing four sided enclosure of open storage shelving filled with dry goods, china, etc which is a working part of the kitchen. The shelving acts as an open screen onto the kitchen, glass faced walk-in cooler and cave, which have been purposefully wrapped around two full sides to maximize the kitchen to dining room interface. Kitchen staff using the shelving during service animates the dining experience. Semi-private booths connect into the dining room through openings in the shelves. Tying into the kitchen supply reference, used cookware which has been generously provided by chefs from around the globe, lines the top of the shelving.
The numerous cultural references and visual complexity of the enveloping partitions creates an environment of depth, character and visual interest. For the finishes, raw concrete structure and floors act as backdrops to wood furniture and fixtures with wrought iron metal details abstracted from historic engravings of kitchens. Turn of the century kitchen supply catalogs were reimaged to create custom wallpapers and decorative touches in auxiliary spaces.
