Presents over seventy venues that stand out for their spectacular interior architecture.

How did the James Beard award–winning design and architecture team AvroKO become one of the hottest restaurant design firms in Manhattan? They start with a concept, which blossoms to images, ideas, colours, and objects. One of the design lexicons that stuck with the design team is "best ugly" – a term that AvroKO came across when traveling together in China. The oxymoronic yet interesting term is used to describe something that is beautiful and charming in an offbeat, awkward, and obtuse sort of way. In their design book, "Best Ugly", the thirtysomething design team of best friends shows readers how each idea and concept can be integrated into a sophisticated design touch. For anyone interested in design, restaurants, architecture, or sexy photography, "Best Ugly" is a visual feast.

In this debut memoir, a James Beard Award–winning writer, whose childhood idea of fine dining was Howard Johnson’s, tells how he became one of Paris’s most influential food critics Until Alec Lobrano landed a job in the glamorous Paris office of Women’s Wear Daily, his main experience of French cuisine was the occasional supermarket éclair. An interview with the owner of a renowned cheese shop for his first article nearly proves a disaster because he speaks no French. As he goes on to cover celebrities and couturiers and improves his mastery of the language, he gradually learns what it means to be truly French. He attends a cocktail party with Yves St. Laurent and has dinner with Giorgio Armani. Over a superb lunch, it’s his landlady who ultimately provides him with a lasting touchstone for how to judge food: “you must understand the intentions of the cook.” At the city’s brasseries and bistros, he discovers real French cooking. Through a series of vivid encounters with culinary figures from Paul Bocuse to Julia Child to Ruth Reichl, Lobrano hones his palate and finds his voice. Soon the timid boy from Connecticut is at the epicenter of the Parisian dining revolution and the restaurant critic of one of the largest newspapers in the France. A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.

An integrated approach to restaurant design, incorporating front- and back-of-the-house operations Restaurant design plays a critical role in attracting and retaining customers. At the same time, design must facilitate food preparation and service. Successful Restaurant Design shows how to incorporate your understanding of the restaurant's front- and back-of-the-house operations into a design that meets the needs of the restaurant's owners, staff, and clientele. Moreover, it shows how an understanding of the restaurant's concept, market, and menu enables you to create a design that not only facilitates a seamless operation but also enhances the dining experience. This Third Edition has been thoroughly revised and updated with coverage of all the latest technological advances in restaurant operations. Specifically, the Third Edition offers: All new case solutions of restaurant design were completed within five years prior to this edition's publication. The examples illustrate a variety of architectural, decorative, and operational solutions for many restaurant types and styles of service. All in-depth interviews with restaurant design experts are new to this edition. To gain insights into how various members of the design team think, the authors interviewed a mix of designers, architects, restaurateurs, and kitchen designers. New information on sustainable restaurant design throughout the book for both front and back of the house. New insights throughout the book about how new technologies and new generations of diners are impacting both front- and back-of-the-house design. The book closes with the authors' forecast of how restaurants will change and evolve over the next decade, with tips on how designers and architects can best accommodate those changes in their designs.

Joel Beath and Elizabeth Price explore this question drawing inspiration from a diverse collection of apartment designs, all smaller than 50m2/540ft2. Through the lens of five small-footprint design principles and drawing on architectural images and detailed floor plans, the authors examine how architects and designers are reimagining small space living. Full of inspiration we can each apply to our own spaces, this is a book that offers hope and inspiration for a future of our cities and their citizens in which sustainability and style, comfort and affordability can co-exist. Never Too Small proves living better doesn’t have to mean living larger.

"Home design combines the essence of architecture and art, and designers do their best to find the new ways in the various contradictions and conflicts to perfectly express their understanding of space and the owners' initial imagination. At the same time, each case built always contains many certain or uncertain factors that refer to the furnishings or even space composition. Each of these factors seems to tell a never ending story and records people's feeling of excitement, confusion, recalling and longing.It is precisely because of these vivid emotional experiences that make home design to be charming and attractive.In order to illustrate the essence of each case in a more accurate way, this book has systematically deconstructed every aspect of the home design that refers to space, structure, interface, decoration as well as special areas. Each of the case is illustrated detailedly from the point of functional area, besides, descriptive text and the corresponding plan vividly recur the transformation from plane to space, from the abstract to the intuition.Reading along the layout of the book, readers not only find inspiration from the cases, but also would experience the peculiarity of the home design and enjoy the tactile sensation of the textured space."

A compilation of restaurant and bar designs that focus completely on the hospitality recieved by the guest.