The space in which we eat can have a powerful effect on what is on our plate. Of course, a meal in uncomfortable surroundings is never going to be entirely fulfilling, but it goes much further than that. The formality or informality of the setting, the colour of the walls, the way our seat faces, even the way the light falls on our plate will all have an effect on our meal. At home we have a choice whether we eat in cosy clutter or spartan simplicity or somewhere between the two. We can make our own mind up whether to close the blinds or lower the lights. But in public spaces, be they restaurants or airports, art galleries or simply corner caffs, it is up to someone else to make those decisions for us. Anyone who designs a public eating space has to consider what is going to please the majority of users. This could, and often does, result in the bland and boring, yet more and more public spaces are becoming a pleasure to eat in. For this we have to thank the vision of the architects and those who back their flights of fancy.
I have always wondered how those who are paid to consider the aesthetics of our public eating spaces eat and cook in their own homes. What are their kitchens like and how does their work relate to the home space? Once Richard Rogers had designed the River Café with his trademarks of space and light, and Frank Gehry had woven his sensuous minimalism on New York's Condé Nast staff canteen, it opened up a world of opportunity for architects to get involved in eating spaces. We asked a host of famous architects where they felt good food and aesthetics meet. Daniel Libeskind gives us a glimpse of his Manhattan kitchen, Thomas Heatherwick shows off his outstanding new beachfront café in Littlehampton and David Chipperfield welcomes us into his Galician villa.
Nigel Slater
Richard Rogers
Lord Rogers of Riverside has previously worked alongside Norman Foster and Renzo Piano. In the last two years he has received the Pritzker and Stirling prizes. His previous projects include the Millennium Dome, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the National Assembly for Wales and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He is married to the Michelin-starred Ruth Rogers of the River Café.
Being the son of an Italian mother is a problem because Italian mothers don't allow their males to cook. Especially in my generation. I have five boys who cook, and I'm the only one that doesn't, I just eat. I'm the one let-down of the family.
I was born in Florence and, culturally, I am Italian. It's very much in my blood. I try to spend as much time in Italy as I can - about seven weeks in total each year. My mother was a really good cook, an Italian Triestine. Their kitchen in England was probably the first I ever designed. Young architects have to start somewhere and it's usually the kitchens that need modernising.
At our house, close to Pienza, there's an amazing wood oven and outdoor grill. We have competitions for pizza-making with any friends or family who happen to be staying. Just the decoration part, as long as Ruthie supplies the ingredients. All the sons, wives and grandchildren come and visit. There's often 20 for lunch.
I always work on holiday, early in the morning. I have various memories of looking out of my parents' house when I was about four or five and seeing a chair and a table put out for the local accountant. I thought, that's the idea, doing your business in a cafe, first thing in the day. I haven't quite got there but I'm pretty close to it. I probably eat, do business, or just come and taste things in the River Café every day. It's an extension of the community that I'm part of. The space outside even more so. I've been very fortunate. It was nothing to start off with. When the opportunity came up, the partnership bought the warehouses and we thought what a good idea to have a little restaurant. There were tremendous planning restrictions so it started as a canteen with sandwiches and came up from that. Ruthie's experience is purely domestic, that's why it's always been a hands-on, chef-led kitchen; and I've known Rose Gray [co-head chef at the River Café] since she was 18.
I don't choose the menus but we discuss food a lot. When we were completing the Pompidou and there was no other work coming in, Renzo Piano, Ruthie and I thought of writing a book called Sex, Food and Architecture. So it was very important to us, even then. We would often talk about the relationship between food and architecture. Food has the advantage of being more immediate. But they are both about a better quality of life. France in the Seventies was leading the way with its markets and atmosphere. Things have moved on to Spain and Italy because they offer simpler food and ways of cooking it. Renzo is my closest friend. I'll see him in 10 days' time for his 70th birthday, and a week later in Genoa. We do a lot of talking.
I think Britain has changed radically in the last 20 years. It was very behind in terms of its food and now it's as good as anywhere, especially London. I'm a chief adviser to the mayor and we are on the way to giving London the best public spaces of any city. The street is the heart of the public domain and it's very much anchored by restaurants, cafes and benches, which you enjoy on a sunny day. I'm all for not having an urban sprawl. I like places you can walk to. Cities are for the meeting of people, that's what it should be about. A friendly environment.
David Chipperfield
David Chipperfield (CBE) went solo in 1984 after working for Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. Most of his work is in Germany, America and the Far East, but he has also designed a restaurant for Wagamama and the British Film Institute. Two new UK projects include art galleries in Wakefield and Margate.
People have different attitudes to cooking, and when you do a kitchen you have to design for the way they live. Now it is accepted that you spend a lot of time in the kitchen so you can give it as much attention as other rooms. It's no longer about being at the back of house. I like a kitchen in the middle of the house, whereas some people like to tuck them away.
At the house in Spain it was fundamental that the kitchen was in the living space. I cook every night at 10 o'clock for seven or eight weeks in the summer. Normally it's for about 20 and I do a pot of something using shells like crab or mussels. Galicia is famous for shells. I have about eight recipes that I use when cooking for large numbers. Many recipes started with Ruthie Rogers at the River Cafe and then got adapted for a large group of people. Galicia is famous in Spain for its fish and as the largest consumer of octopus in the world. In the old days we used to buy the fish straight off the boats. The fishermen give us things now and again but they're not really allowed to any more. It's all got to be taken to the market to be regulated. It's a very primitive part of the country and the weather is unpredictable, like a very warm Cornwall but without all the people. We invite lots - clients, and people from the office.
Positioning kitchens in galleries and museums isn't really about cooking; it's about commercial criteria and whether they want the restaurants to be accessed independently to operate beyond the hours of the museum. In Germany there's an anxiety that the restaurant shouldn't be the first thing you see, whereas in England there's this commercial fear that if you don't see the restaurant you won't know it's there.
You have to create an atmosphere in restaurants with a bit of complexity. The Ivy is a good example but I wouldn't necessarily have done it that way. I designed a Wagamama on Lexington Street in Soho for Alan Yau - I'm a big fan of his, I like Busaba Eathai. Most people tend to stick to four or five restaurants and I'm loyal to Jeremy King and Alan Yau. I also did a Nobu in Miami, Circus in Soho, and the restaurant in the Bryant Park Hotel in New York.
I'm doing a museum in Anchorage, Alaska. We were fishing once and a guy caught a salmon, grilled it there and then, but covered it in barbecue sauce and ruined it. In America they have a tendency to smother things. I do a lot of travelling and if I'm in St Louis or Barcelona it's inevitable you end up going to dinner with a client. I've become slightly jaded because when you go to lots of nice restaurants you get spoilt and you can't savour it in the same way. I don't think that the best food I ever tasted was in a restaurant.
Will Alsop
Will Alsop (OBE) is the founder of SMC Alsop. In 2000 he won the Stirling Prize for the Peckham Library. He has practices in Beijing, London, Shanghai and Singapore.
Architects don't build many buildings. When you have a commission you're going to have a relationship with that client for up to five years, so you've got to be able to sit at a table together. I'm obsessed with tables in one way or another. There are things that you'd say and do around a table that you wouldn't do if it wasn't there: it's the function that interests me. I've been thinking about a table with a sculpted surface so you can actually serve the food straight on to the table. Then you'd have a slit down the middle where you can fit the waste sack and wipe food over it. I have designed it, but it would be extremely expensive to make. Many ideas stick in the back of my mind and when the time is right they'll come out. Maybe in a better form.
I don't deal with names but many of my buildings are given them, which is fine. A new housing project in Manchester is called Chips because it looks like three chips on top of each other. It's in three chips because it's a nine-storey building and if you do it as a slab it just looks like a nine-storey slab. I often get accused of being too fun but what's wrong with that? There's no intellectual basis for trying to dismiss something as being merely fun. The converse of fun is boredom, misery or sadness. Will that make the world a better place? I don't think so, but there's a lot of it about. I like unlikely combinations and the element of surprise is vastly underrated in architecture. People like to turn a corner and go, What on earths that?
What I like about Baltic is walking through a pair of curtains into a very mysterious dark space which opens up into a very light space. It's not over-designed and at the same time not austerely minimal, which would get on my nerves. I'm austerely maximal. It was a genuine discovery for me when I was doing the Palestra building opposite. Ill usually order borscht, and they do very good liver. Its a winter cuisine really because in the Baltic they have a long winter. Magical summers, but they are short.
I'm a die-hard smoker. In Toronto, where I work regularly, smoking has been banned for a lot longer than here. Each year it gets more and more draconian. When I first went there you were only allowed to smoke on what they called the patio. Then they decided even if the patio has a protective roof over it of less than 4.5 metres, which is quite high, you're still not allowed to smoke there either. So, the enlightened restaurants raise their roofs if they can, but that's not always possible. In Manchester there's a bar called Dukes 92 and they've got a huge patio with awnings and heaters which could probably seat 500 people. Now that's a response to the smoking ban.
· Baltic Restaurant, 74 Blackfriars Road, London SE1; 020 7928 1111; www.balticrestaurant.co.uk
Amanda Levete
Amanda Levete worked for Richard Rogers and Will Alsop in the Eighties. In 1989 she became one half of Future Systems whose most notable projects include Selfridges, Birmingham, and the NatWest Media Centre at Lord's Cricket Ground, which won the Stirling Prize in 1999.
An architect can get a lot of work done in a restaurant. I bring my team from the office here if we have something to celebrate, or I bring a client, or I just come with my boyfriend. Eating is all about communication and exchanging ideas. There's a big blurring in my life between work and pleasure. It all merges into one and the restaurant is the venue for that.
When I started working for Richard Rogers, the River Café was like our canteen. At first I'd take my mum there for a cheap bowl of soup but within months it had completely taken off. As it became more successful they'd do special deals for those who worked there and then you'd have to eat at slightly odd times. I've got all Ruth's cookbooks and use them a lot. Richard's a lovely man.
In most of the restaurants I frequent, there's a design/work connection. The director of Scott's, Mark Hix asked us to do a number of pieces: the crustacean holder, the champagne trolley and buckets, and the washbasins. With product design there's always a specific function: it's very exact. Other issues are its sculptural presence and ergonomic function. With a trolley, it has to be something that you can manipulate easily between tables and not take up too much room. Originally, Jeremy King commissioned us to do the trolley for the Ivy and the buckets for Le Caprice. With design you can explore the geometries and push the aesthetic in a way that you're not always able to with a building, because of the technical and functional constraints. Also, the return on your investment is four months. A building takes a long, painful, but rewarding, four years.
The ground floor of Selfridges has got an oyster bar, a patisserie and a deli counter, and it has very much become the place to meet. Eating in a shop is very different from eating in a restaurant. You don't want to dwell. It was really important for us to provide a space in which you could feel equally comfortable with a small group or by yourself. Therefore we designed these petals that mean you can sit alone, or opposite one another. The ethos of the food hall was that it had a market feel. There aren't shelves. Everything is casually laid out, and low-slung, like a Moroccan market. The design is totally open and fluid.
I'm doing a private house in Dublin where the couple entertain on quite a large scale. We're doing all the furniture and cutlery so it's almost like a restaurant: it's about creating a quality and a presence that's comfortable but at the same time architecturally exciting. I've always wanted to design a restaurant and you bet I'd do the interior. For me I don't understand how you can separate the inside from the outside.
Once we did a proposal with restaurateur Alan Yau for Battersea Power Station before it was sold. Alan had this great idea to cross a nightclub with a restaurant and brothel. It was going to be a 24-hour operation where you could rent booths by the hour. It was a wild brief and that extracted a wild proposal from us.
I have favourite dishes at Scott's. The stone-bass ceviche served with deep-fried plantain, the Dover sole and the sea bream. There used to be a cod's tongue starter, and I should ask Mark why they took it off. I don't feel guilty about eating anything. I love dark chocolate, but prefer to have a starter and a main, and then a chocolate truffle with a coffee. I never get sick of eating out but I'm not adventurous. I like to be introduced to places but I'll naturally go to ones I know.
· Scott's, 20 Mount Street, London W1; 020 7495 7309; www.scotts-restaurant.com
Terry Farrell
Sir Terry Farrell has had his own practice for over 40 years. His London projects include Embankment Place, the MI6 headquarters, and the Greenwich Peninsula masterplan, currently under way. In 2004 he was made the 'design champion' for Edinburgh to advise on future development of the city.
Nicknames for buildings is a new thing and a lot are connected to food: the 'gherkin', the 'cheese-grater'. A pair of tall buildings in Chicago which have circular balconies going around were very quickly called the 'corncobs'. The only nicknames buildings used to have were derogatory ones. You could have easily called the gherkin the 'cruise missile'.
I believe a lot of architects invent the names at the time of design because an association with a smaller, familiar object makes it instantly cuddly and loveable. When I did Embankment Place it could never be given a simple name because it's a more complex kind of building. Whereas today, buildings look more like one-liners: they can be technologically much more sophisticated but there's a slight dumbing-down of the language.
As design champion for Edinburgh, I've had catered dinners in our apartment on York Place with MSPs, council leaders and other senior people. I do like to approve the menu in advance but not as much as my secretaries. They get terribly excited and worked-up about these things. And there's all sorts of protocol these days. Are they vegetarian? Any nut allergies? Once upon a time you were grateful for whatever you were given.
Delikatesn is a tiny corner place down some stairs in New Town and, if it weren't for the menu they left us, I don't think I'd ever have found it. It's like a home from home because I live next to a great Portuguese deli in London. My home is above the office in an old furniture factory on Lisson Grove, NW1. I once had a party for 150 people and the Spanish restaurant across the road brought in big pans of paella. It's called Don Pepe's but we call it the canteen. I subsidise a happy hour for the staff there on Friday nights. I like local businesses. Particularly in my area, which always needs a bit of support.
In the course of an architectural career there are kitchens of all kinds. The conference centre in Edinburgh I designed takes 1,000 people, so the kitchen's right next to the dining area for a fast turnaround. I once did an extension to Rules restaurant in Covent Garden. I think it's the oldest restaurant in London. We almost doubled its size by extending into next door, matching the old building so it was seamless. I'm involved in putting a restaurant in the library of the Royal Institution where they hold the Christmas science lectures. I've argued that we should have carpets, tablecloths and curtains but, from the managerial side, this means stains on the floor, food smells in the curtains and tablecloths you have to clean. One of the recent revolutions of restaurant taste is the rise of what would be café style. Hard surfaces and sharp acoustics have become upmarket. That would never have been good taste even 10 years ago.
· Delikatesn, 1a York Place, Edinburgh EH1; 0131 556 1133; www.delikatesn.com
Rafael Viñoly
Rafael Viñoly was born in Uruguay, educated in Argentina and emigrated to New York in 1978. His projects include 20 Fenchurch Street in London, the Vdara Condo Hotel in Las Vegas, and the City College of New York's School of Architecture.
Food is definitely not one of my passions. I don't know any of the fashionable restaurants. I don't need overly complicated experiences. I have a short temper for stupidity and I have an enormous counter-reaction to pomposity. My business is conducted in one place, Mezzogiorno, in the office or wherever the client wants to take me. It's like ballet: I know ballet is a wonderful thing to see but I'm not cultivated enough for it, like I'm not cultivated enough for food. I'm sure I've missed something.
Mezzogiorno is three blocks from the office. It is the most unremarkable place but it has this warmth and sense of purpose. It has a good Italian cook, early-Eighties decor, drawings and sculptures from Florence, and an atmosphere created by incredible, sympathetic owners. They know what I eat and suggest things. I'm not fussy.
We have an extremely good young Brazilian cook at home in downtown New York. My wife, Diana, helped her through one of the best cooking schools in New York. When we travel we take food on the plane prepared by her. She surprises us every night. You don't need to choose; you just sit down and there is something prepared. It's very Japanese in a way. There are some restaurants in Japan I've been lucky enough to go to that are not even advertised - just a kitchen and six chairs. And you get no choice: you eat whatever the guy gives you. It is a completely different every time and costs more than the Hotel Bel-Air.
I'm doing a huge hotel in Las Vegas, with 14 restaurants. It is interesting that people in this industry, with an eye on the consumer, build with the idea that in six months' time they will change again. I don't think that is a good thing - why change if it's working? But they change it simply to regenerate the image. It's very dangerous territory. In order to achieve excellence, things ought not to be on a seasonal cycle. You couldn't write Shakespeare on that basis.
· Mezzogiorno, 195 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012; (212) 334 2112; www.mezzogiorno.com
Thomas Heatherwick
Thomas Heatherwick is a designer, self-taught architect, artist and all-round visionary whose eclectic body of work includes the Rolling Bridge in London's Paddington Basin, the UK's tallest public sculpture, Manchester's 'B of the Bang', and the dramatic East Beach Cafe in Littlehampton.
I'm interested in things being particular to their location. For something to be sustainable, it has to be specific to its location, because the idea is to have a building that will never need to be recycled. The East Beach Cafe isn't a council project, and there's no additional funding. It's essentially funded by a Mr Whippy machine and we had an enormous responsibility to make that achievable.
I met the owner Jane Wood at a party. She told me about her dream of having a beach café and was very open to what it might be. We both agreed we didn't want anything that would hook on to sea cliches like sails or yachts. The site is closer to the sea than the buildings around it, so it didn't need to be caught in the tyranny of being 'in-keeping', so no polite reworking of Regency buildings. We asked ourselves: what is the character of the sea? We decided it's all the bits and bobs you find among the rocks and pebbles on the beach. The building didn't need to be pretty, but to be tough to cope with kids, sand and seagulls' poo.
There were practical constraints, like the site has a long promenade that we couldn't build on, and a high-pressure sewage line at the back, which meant it had to be long and thin. We didn't want windows at the back because it was a car park and so we played on the feel of being in a cave. We put diagonals going through to give it a stepped profile.
Our work is mainly buildings now and it's progressed from Konstam [a restaurant in London's King's Cross] last year, which was just the interior, to this, a whole building. We're now working on a restaurant in Hong Kong.
A restaurant is only as good as its food and its service. The design is third on the list. I admire chefs. They have to be brilliant all the time. That is terrifying for me because I am a slow thinker. As a designer of buildings you need time to immerse yourself. A chef has to produce his best work every day.
I get my best ideas through discussion. I'm trying to make a way we can all ricochet thoughts off each other; in the new studio there is a long, open kitchen and dining area. Meetings will take place virtually in the kitchen. The main reason is to have as many different groups bumping into each other as possible. In the studio there is a big group of architects but also people with diverse backgrounds like theatre design.
I've been interested in designing buildings since I was tiny. Buildings are fascinating because they need so many different forms of expertise.
· East Beach Cafe, Littlehampton, West Sussex; 01903 731903; www.eastbeachcafe.co.uk
