In good taste

Creating that synergy between the chefs and the diners takes careful planning, said Jennifer Johanson, chief executive officer, president and design leader for EDG, one of the nation’s top design firms specializing in restaurants.

Johanson, who was the guest speaker at this month’s First Fridays event at the Las Vegas Design Center at World Market Center, spoke to peers about how she creates restaurant designs that complement the establishments’ marketing plans, resulting in successful businesses.

When she first started creating interiors for restaurants more than 17 years ago, she said her work was more of a novelty than common practice. “But today, design is a big, big part of the business for restaurants.”

Johanson has worked on more than 150 restaurants during her career, including several for noted chefs such as Wolfgang Puck (including the Springs Preserve Café), Bradley Ogden, Kent Rathbun and Joachim Splichal.

“While it’s fun to design a restaurant, you need to take it seriously. It needs to be functional,” Johanson said. “Our mission is not just to design a beautiful restaurant, but to establish a design-based business strategy and develop strategies for the restaurant that make money.”

To accomplish this, Johanson said she asks her clients to develop specific marketing objectives; then she creates complementary design objectives for each goal.

Johanson showed sketches and photographs of five restaurants her firm designed to illustrate her philosophy.

At the Four Seasons in Vancouver, British Columbia, EDG worked on the design for Yew, a restaurant and bar with a Pacific Northwestern soul. Located near the main lobby, the hotel wanted to redesign the area combining two amenities into one to reduce overhead, attract outside traffic, highlight its regional position, develop intimate spaces within the large area and drive revenue. Johanson’s correlating objectives were to create an establishment that accommodated those seeking meals three times a day as well as offering fine dining, build a display kitchen, incorporate authentic Pacific Northwestern design, install free-standing elements to help carve up the volume and design multifunctional platforms that would allow for adaptability.

Her solutions included creating a screened off entrance to give people a sense of arrival as well as separating the restaurant from the remainder of the hotel, building an espresso/wine bar near the front, carving out a private dining room by surrounding the area with special wine storage shelves, adding a fireplace that would provide warmth as well as help divide the space, using native fir trees that had fallen in a recent storm as both decorative elements and as table tops, and placing the seating in ways that would allow the restaurant to close off specific areas if they were not needed.

She also spoke of her designs for The Source, a restaurant by Wolfgang Puck within the Newseum in Washington, D.C.; Straits, which offers Singapore street food from a eatery located within a San Francisco area mall; Jaspers, a gourmet backyard concept in Dallas; and The Market Cafe, a cafeteria/wine bar concept in Cleveland, Ohio, focusing on a sustainable lifestyle and creating a good work/life balance.

Johanson said she often uses screens to add layers and create intimacy without restrictive boundaries for carving out areas within areas. Other successful design treatments include enclosing private dining areas in glass-walled spaces so that diners can retain a sense of privacy while still being part of the crowd; expanding bars and adding espresso features so they can serve different functions at different times of the day; and using the location of the restaurant for inspiration for the décor.