There are well-designed restaurants, and then there are restaurants that are such fully realized worlds, they transport you. Those are the ones we want to go back to again and again.
Best Designed Restaurant of the Year: Leo’s Oyster Bar
San Francisco
There are no bad seats or unflattering angles at this gorgeous oyster bar. Instead, there’s just you, your date, two glasses of Champagne, and a universe of rose-colored onyx bartops, vintage glassware, shell-shaped wall sconces, and tropical palm wallpaper. It’s a Mad Men set you get to drink in.
The Runners Up:
Winsome
Los Angeles
They don’t make ’em much cuter than this all-day café in Echo Park, with its painterly wall mural inspired by Phil Dike’s 1938 watercolor Sunshine in Echo Park, midcentury-style cane chairs, and the most important detail: a vegetable-heavy menu we want to come back for every week.
3 Arts Club Café
Chicago
Never have we ever even considered eating in a Restoration Hardware. And then we walked into this place, a remodeled building named for the women’s club that occupied it for almost a century. At the center of the tree-filled atrium, an opulent chandelier dangles over a grandiose fountain, as luxurious a setting for a bacon club sandwich as there ever was.
N7
New Orleans
At this hidden New Orleans-via-Paris café, you’re not a customer; you’re an extra in a Truffaut film. And you’re drinking natural wines and eating tinned seafood, surrounded by gallery posters and a 1972 Citroen. And you never want to leave.
Few restaurants sum up the brighter, lighter restaurant-design trajectory of 2016 as strongly as Tilda, which the design firm MP Shift outfitted in a clean graphic prints, lots of white tile, gold and brass accents, and cheerful plants.