The most chic and beloved restaurants in New York are designed, not by blackgarbed hipsters in a downtown loft, but by a family firm of suburban intellectuals on the North Shore of Long Island, over an hour from Manhattan. Craftsteak is the latest in their portfolio which includes Gramercy Tavern, Tabla, Eleven Madison Park, Bluesmoke, Craft, Craftbar, ’Wichcraft, Medi, and the restaurants at the Museum of Modern Art. Jayne Merkel discusses the challenges of restaurant design with architects at Bentel & Bentel, whose once largely local practice is now taking them all over the world, even to Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 where they are designing a restaurant for Gordon Ramsay.
Paul Bentel, his brother Peter Bentel, their wives Carol Rusche Bentel and Susan Nagle, and their father Frederick R Bentel, work out of a woodsy, skylit, multilevel studio that Frederick carved out of a 19th-century house and then expanded with his wife and first partner. Maria Azzarone Bentel, an early graduate of MIT and professor of architecture at the New York Institute of Technology, died in 2000. Now the rest of her family carries on the practice which was devoted largely to institutional buildings – libraries, schools, churches, synagogues – until 1992 when a contractor recommended them to Danny Meyer, who was about to become the most successful restaurateur in New York. The contractor was doing some work on Meyer’s apartment. He thought Bentel & Bentel would be the right people to help the young entrepreneur expand his already successful Union Square Café, which had been designed by Larry Bogdanow, the restaurant designer of the moment. Bentel & Bentel were a strange choice. They didn’t even live in the city, let alone the neighbourhood (Gramercy Park) where all Meyer’s restaurants were located. Although they had won numerous Long Island design awards, the Bentels were not very interested in fashion, and most restaurants at the time were designed as stage sets. As Paul Bentel puts it: ‘The “Wow Look” is all that mattered.’ He and his partners were working on PhDs in architectural theory at MIT and happiest doing libraries. But Meyer, who now owns the two most highly rated restaurants in New York City (the Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern), was not a typical restaurateur. He wanted to make his customers feel welcome and at home, not lucky to have been let in and proud of having the best table in a glittery place. He was not a chef, but an entrepreneur, whose father in St Louis had been in the travel business, seeing the hospitality industry from the customer’s side. When they started talking to Meyer, the Bentels realised that their experience was more relevant than one might have thought. ‘We had a longstanding tradition of institutional work which involves translating ideas about what people want into architecture,’ Peter notes. ‘Computerised bibliographic systems came out at the same time as the use of computers in restaurants,’ adds Paul. ‘The circulation desk is similar to the maî tre d’ stand in a restaurant, and the idea is the same – to make things seem effortless.’ Also, earlier in his career Meyer had been the top salesman in a company that made library book detection systems, so he didn’t even mind if they lapsed into library lingo. Meyer’s restaurants, like the Bentels’ public buildings on Long Island, have a distinctive sense of place. The New York Times’ Bryan Miller described Union Square Café as ‘a part of the neighborhood but not imposed on it’. Big windows allow passers-by to look in on happy diners glowing under little Bentel & Bentel, Craftsteak, New York, 2006 The front room of Craftsteak, like those at Danny Meyer’s restaurants, is devoted to a bar and casual dining. This one has a raw seafood bar and a bar for drinks that is framed by a two-storey glass and blackened-steel wine vault. A riveted column is left as raw as the oysters on the half shell to the right.
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