S E C T O R S P O T L I G H T: R E S TA U R A N T S Designs for three high-profile restaurants mix the artful and practical. BY MAT THEW HALL 26 Boutique Design | March+April 2012 Aaron Pocock (Sky on 57); Paul Burk (Fiola); Paul Johnson (Molyvos) Appetizing Destinations T he restaurant business is notoriously Darwinian: A widely quoted study on the failure rates of such businesses that appeared several years ago in the Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly concluded that roughly one quarter of all restaurants close or change ownership within their first year of business, a figure that rises to 60 percent within five years. Those numbers may well have shot up during the Great Recession. But that hasn’t stopped new restaurants from trying their luck, and existing ones from investing in renovations in an effort to keep customers coming through the doors. In both instances, savvy designers are striving to create dining environments that are visually memorable and operationally efficient, all in an effort to increase an eatery’s odds of survival. The following three case studies vividly illustrate that trend. Sky on 57 (left) is a new restaurant sitting atop the spectacular Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore; Fiola (center) is a new Italian trattoria in Washington, D.C., that inhabits a “graveyard” site where five restaurant concepts had previously failed; and Molyvos (right) is a popular Greek eatery in New York that opened in 1997 and recently sought to refresh itself with a major makeover.