Can design sour a restaurant's success?
by A. LaBan
Chicago is, primarily, a city of storefront restaurants, small and comfortable neighborhood eateries in first-floor retail spaces, often with several floors of tenants above. Occasionally, however, a restaurant attempts to stake a claim with design and needs to be reminded that a focus on form over function can be a disaster in the kitchen.
The most visually offensive restaurant area of the city is River North, specifically the "touristaville" section between Ohio and Ontario, where the Hard Rock's guitar duels with the bulbous-eyed frog squatting over the Rainforest Café. We're soon to lose the big blue dinosaur grinning over Planet Hollywood to bankruptcy, but we're still stuck with Portillo's/Barnelli's huge neon billboard. Shockingly bad taste draws tourists, and many city dwellers, like flies. Only one other restaurant in Chicago rivals the tourist traps of River North for design indignities. Built in 1995, the cavernous Cheesecake Factory now defaces the base of one the city's classic architectural monuments with copper-clad awnings that sprout from the bottom of Big John like shell-shaped fungus at the base of a tree. The exterior only gives hints of an incomprehensible interior, created for a rumored $15.2 million as a tribute to the life and loves and ego of Cheesecake Factory chairman, president, CEO and overall big cheese David Overton. Apparently, Overton spent his early years as a drummer in a rock band, so, according to Jordan Mozer and Associates, the design firm responsible for the Hancock Cheesecake Factory, "liquid, psychedelic images" from sixties rock posters, as well as additional images from Overton's favorite Art Nouveau Parisian cafes, are interpreted in the floor murals, cast aluminum railings and almost everything else, down to the revolving doors' handles. The nozzles, tubes, pipes and pumps oozing cheesecake goo at Overton's California cheesecake manufacturing facility inspired the "pudgy interior architecture of the walls, arches, and ceilings, the exterior wood and granite facades and copper awnings," among other design elements.
Nonetheless, the monstrosity of the Mag Mile is the top-grossing Cheesecake Factory nationwide, ringing up approximately $17 million a year, making it one of the top revenue-generating dining spots in the city, as well as the entire country. Diners are seemingly willing to subject themselves to endless waits for a table, and the restaurant has an ongoing problem in keeping expensive, handmade lamps and other ornaments from being ripped off by the same visitors. Restaurants that deliver quality to the table can almost always be forgiven for their visual excesses. Hudson Club for example, another Jordan Mozer production, looks like a big, squat toaster plugged in on Wells, and its sprawling interior, deafening when crowded, has been described as "an airplane hangar on crack," but the restaurant consistently delivers on the plate and in the glass, with one of the best wine selections in town. Wicker Park's Souk has a blue-and-eggplant facade crowned by four yellow stanchions that rise above its front windows like pairs of bulls' horns and a front door covered with brown, white and black patterned horse hair to complete the herd-animal motif. Inside are leather-topped tables, uncomfortable plate-armor chairs and the city's only shisha (waterpipe) bar. Still, Souk, which began as Egyptian but has now gravitated toward Middle Eastern/Mediterranean, remains one of the better destinations in one of the most creative dining neighborhoods in the city. Even Red Light can be forgiven for the folly of crowning itself with a giant tongue of flame, which looks more like a chile pepper on steroids, since luring executive chef Paul Wildermuth back into the kitchen. ("I thought you said it was Asian, not Mexican," remarked a friend when a cab dropped us off at the door.) It's when the food is as muddled as the design that trouble is in store for both the eyes and the tastebuds, a situation currently best illustrated by the new Technicolor Kitchen. Decked out like a Hudson-Club-wannabe with a fa'ade of rippling aluminum punctuated by five tiny, irregularly-shaped porthole windows that resemble mold on cheese, natural light is as inaccessible as the menu. Confused starters include fiery salmon with a pink pepper blueberry tartar sauce; then there are the entrées, like black pepper and ginger braised lamb shank, crushed baby potatoes and roasted tomatoes with a reduced balsamic vinaigrette sorbet. The restaurant's Website proudly describes this whole proposition: "Candlelight softens the riot of colors on the walls -- a 64-color box of Crayolas also could have been used to shade the menu." I describe it as a mess.
Barnelli's Pasta Bowl/Portillo's Hot Dogs, 100 West Ontario, (312)587-8930/10
The Cheesecake Factory, 875 North Michigan, (312)337-1101
Hard Rock Café, 63 West Ontario, (312)943-2252
Hudson Club, 504 North Wells, (312)467-1947
Rainforest Café, 605 North Clark, (312)787-1501
Souk, 1552 North Milwaukee, (773)227-9110
Technicolor Kitchen, 3210 North Lincoln, (773)665-2111
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