Dinner with a show: six theatrical restaurant projects

With the modern prevalence of high-quality ingredients, gastronomic apparatus and culinary skill, the renaissancing restaurant scene is saturated, with five-star venues popping up everywhere from expensive postcodes to vans on street corners.

In order to compete in a competitive marketplace, many restaurants are branching out into other hospitality areas, offering much more than just a Sunday Specials board. By focusing on the experience portion of the eating-out experience, entertainment has become the discerning restaurant’s fourth course. Here are six restaurant projects that sprinkle their meals with entertaining seasoning.

Blue Frog by Serie Architects
Mumbai, India

The Blue Frog Lounge combines performance and dining spaces, simultaneously immersing diners in the performance while allowing them to remain separate from it. Each table is centred in its own zone with encircling seating, connected by an undulating plexiglass-topped sea. This in-between space, lit from below with LEDs, sets the mood for the performances, becoming part of the set itself.

Positioned at varying heights, the tables rise as they get further from the stage to create a more social kind of amphitheatre, while half-height partitions with cut-out entrance/exits guide diners in and out, without affecting sight-lines.

Circus by Research Design Studio
London, UK

If, however, you prefer your theatre on the immersive side, Tom Dixon’s Research Design Studio’s Circus restaurant in London’s West End, UK, is your kind of venue. With an interior influenced by big-top circus, burlesque and cabaret decorative styles, Circus’ informal dining atmosphere encourages diners to, at first, share their plate space with the performance itself – the main dining table doubles as a catwalk stage – before joining in themselves. A landscaped ceiling of mirror globes, kaleidoscopic reception desk and an integrated dance pole combine to tease conversation, participation and merriment from guests.

Puma Loge by Halfmann Mennickheim Design
Signal Iduna Park, Dortmund, Germany

Contrary to the usual grandeur of VIP boxes at higher-tier football grounds – often used to secure business partnerships rather than follow the beautiful game – Halfmann Mennickheim Design’s Puma Loge VIP box interior reflects the Puma and Borussia Dortmund brands’ focus on fans of sport.

With tactile surfaces and materials evoking typical football stadia language, the VIP box includes references such as plastic seat shells, dressing room style benches and even its own version of Dortmund’s famous Yellow Wall, inspired by the ground’s 25,000 capacity south stand. A daunting sight for the opposition to face when filled with passionate flag-waving fans on match day.

Cocktail Kitchen by ANARCHITECT
Dubai, UAE

Ordering cocktails at the bar can be an exclusive, theatrical experience itself. The extra time, space and skill required are a wonder to behold. With ill-fitting design, however, a queue of customers as angry as they are thirsty quickly builds when a cocktail is requested.

As a space specifically designed by ANARCHITECT for the celebration and education of both the culinary and mixology crafts, Cocktail Kitchen ensures enough time and space are provided to provide both. A 15-metre long bar stretches out to give ample space for sharing drink genres, while two separate cocktail bars and one cooking bar delight a captive audience of spectators and students, watching the craftspeople at work.

Living Lab for Pizza Express by AB Rogers Design
London, UK

The theatre of spinning a pizza around one’s finger, elegantly throwing on an array of toppings like a blackjack dealer and sliding the masterpiece into a furnace with the steely determination of a blacksmith makes pizza-makers stand with flaring mixologists as the iconic creatives of the hospitality arts. Because of this, pizza restaurants are early-adopters of the open kitchen concept.

With hanging mirrors and toppings set into the worktop, however, Pizza Express’s Living Lab concept restaurant goes a few steps further, becoming a stage for chefs to perform their best tricks. Other dining innovations include a street-facing deli window, huge acoustic domes with iPod docks that hang over tables to personalise the soundscape and a kids' zone with shared colouring table, stealth-education video games and a make-your-own pizza workshop.

YooYuumi Kids Club by X+LIVING
Beijing, China

Far from the wipe-clean plastic and bold primary colour scheme of children’s restaurants of old, YooYuumi Kids Club is an eatery that’s both child- and parent-friendly. Block-coloured decor and furniture are still calming in their simplicity, but without the garishness, while an almost comic-book idea of regality is sprinkled over the interior to delight both customer bases.

By splitting dining and play areas with a large, open space in-between, the constant cacophony fails to disrupt and distract from the mealtime. While the inclusion of energetic entertainment with ball-pit alongside a more sedate home play section ensures children with various play preferences are equally catered for.

© Architonic