This is The Feast 14, in which we highlight the most anticipated projects of the new season. Here now, the AvroKO design team and Chef Brad Farmerie on their forthcoming Double Crown reboot, Saxon & Parole.
Later this month, the design firm AvroKO, known for ornately-designed restaurants like The Stanton Social and The Hurricane Club, will open Saxon & Parole, a reboot of the three year-old restaurant Double Crown. Chef Brad Farmerie will remain in the kitchen and has designed a new menu for what they're calling a "twist" on the classic North American meat and seafood grill.
The Feast sat down with AvroKO partners William Harris, Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie and Greg Bradshaw along with Chef Brad Farmerie to discuss the design process, horses as muses and working on a tight budget.
Chef, is Double Crown the first time that you've had to reevaluate a restaurant concept that you opened?
Brad Farmerie: Yes, but we're attacking this as if it were a completely new project. This is certainly not a revamp or a redo or a remodel—it's a full on new restaurant. That's nice because you can almost set the endpoint for that last restaurant and start by treating this space as raw and the menu as completely blank.
When you work with AvroKO on a project, where do new ideas come from?
BF: From great conversations around this very table. It's a collaborative effort about food, space, graphics and feel. We don't want to be doing something that isn't in our hearts. We want to make sure that we can find a way to link the food that I want to do with the design.
AvroKO Partner, Kristina O’Neal: Brad's being modest. He's the boss of everything. We pretty much just do whatever he says.
AvroKO Partner, Adam Farmerie: Well, I think Kristina is being modest. We share one brain. We spend way too much time together.
Next month, your restaurant Double Crown will reopen as Saxon & Parole. When did that conversation start happening?
BF: It was a concept that we had talked about on and off for a long time, [dating back to] a trip to Vegas maybe four years ago, when we talked about cool stuff we'd like to do someday.
When the restaurant was first announced there seemed to be some confusion about what type of restaurant Saxon & Parole would be. Care to clarify now?
BF: I think the cleanest [explanation] would be that we're celebrating the grill, with grilled meats and aquatic delights, all with a slight twist. I can't take all those ingredients that I love completely out of my food. We're going to sort of re-position dishes that people think that they've seen before but do them better.
KN: We've had a lot of conversations around Public; we always wanted to do Public's domestic little sister, something that was connected in some way, but would be a totally different market. If you weren't going to be eating offal or game meat and you wanted to go have an incredible steak done the way Brad would do it, this is the place you could go.
What's the process like between the five of you?
AF: We all kind of circle around the same stuff. Traditionally, Greg and I are architects, so we think about space differently than Kristina and Bill, who were trained as artists so they're coming at it from a different angle. And Brad is gonna come in and say "Well, I think that we should look at this particular part of the space differently," because of an experience that he's had. No one is dealt out the individual task of accomplishing a singular element—it's been a really collaborative experience.
BF: Seeing how these guys work is refreshing, because everyone gives their opinion on what the other person's doing, and it comes together to be something better than one person could have done. Even with my food. We've been doing tastings, and when we serve it on the table and talk about it, it's like—does this match our end goal? Even if it's a good dish, is it cohesive with the plan?
AF: We enjoy participating in each other's work. Nobody ever feels offended if somebody says "Well I think that that's wrong."
If Brad's cooking drives your design, as you've said, how does his desire to do "twists" on the familiar translate to your vision for the space?
KN: We didn't want to do a straight-out American interior, just like Brad's food isn't going to be straight out—he's going all over the world to find ingredients. Likewise, we have a lot of twists and turns in there that are, Bauhausian for instance, which isn't American in nature.
AF: We sort of married two idealistic eras in order to come up with this collision of like-mindedness within the space. There's that nostalgia of the sort of ideal state—the late 1800's, early 1900's in New York. That great story that is Saxon & Parole. And we found this other point in time that happened to be this notion of the Bauhaus and it held similar truths.
Is this the first time you have used characters or a story (in this case, the story of Saxon & Parole) as inspiration for your design?
KN: There's always a muse.
AvroKO Partner, William Harris: Sometimes it manifests itself as an icon or an object or an era.
KN: We were already steeped in some deep Americana—collectively, we own a horse stable in Tuxedo Park.
WH: In this case and in several others the muse has become a bit of a persona. Madame Geneva was sort of similar, in that sense, where it was our own fictitious story, but it was one generated by our collective interests, travels and imaginations.
This is also the first time that AvroKO has redesigned a space that it had designed from scratch. Does that make the process more difficult?
AvroKO Partner, Greg Bradshaw: Yes, it's sad to see the last thing go, but at the same time you've really got a whole new concept that you're exploring, so you kind of have to divorce that from your head a little bit. The difficult thing is how economical we've had to be. We've had to be very cognizant of what's going to create the most impact for the least amount of dollars.
AvroKO spaces have become fairly distinctive in their design, in part due to the signature level of detail. They look, for lack of a better word, expensive. Will some of that be missing given the budget limitations here?
WH: Can we use that as a testimonial on our website for our clients to read?
KN: Truthfully, almost all of them are done on a shoestring budget.
'Shoestring' must be a relative term in this case?
KN: It is relative, but you would be shocked at what we're actually doing for the amount of money we're given to do it.
WH: And how we had to bend the child labor laws.
KN: Children. Small fingers, small details... This should be on the record. We do not use children. Ever. [The Feast]
