Restaurateur Christopher Myers invited famed designer Enzo Apicella over to his place, Via Matta in Boston, for a little wine and some discussion of restaurant design. It wasn’t long before both were flowing. Apicella shrugged off any pretentiousness in design and distilled his own creations down to the very basic human need for a clean, well-lighted place in which to be fortified and to connect with the world.

(Photo by Eric Levin)

It was all set up. When we heard that 82-year-old Enzo Apicella, the legendary Italian restaurant designer who has designed 141 restaurants in Europe, including the famed Princess Diana haunt, San Lorenzo in London, was bringing his genius to America, we thought, “Hmmm…this could be very interesting.” His US project, Croma, is around the corner from Boston’s Via Matta, #4 on Esquire’s 2004 list of the “Top Ten Restaurants at the Top of Their Game.” Why not get Apicella and Via Matta’s conceptor (if that’s a word?), Christopher Myers, together? A bottle or three of wine? A discussion of restaurant design?

Interesting, it was. Anyone who has been around either man knows them as conceptual visionaries. It was Apicella—cartoonist, illustrator, NBC set designer, art collector—who was credited not only with sparking the 60’s mod movement in London (Myers: “I thought it was Austin Powers...”) but with a host of “firsts” we now take for granted. Contemporary art in restaurants. Pods of lights over tables. And high-end design for the masses.

What Starbucks did for coffee, Apicella did first a long time ago for pizza in the UK.  His contemporary, art-filled designs were instrumental in what is now the 300-unit PizzaExpress. Its success was built not only on gourmet pizza made from authentic Italian ingredients but on a hip experience for everyman via cutting-edge design.

Apicella is an artist. His restaurants begin as sketches that architects translate into reality. Myers works not from sketches but from images, the feeling that he wants his restaurants to evoke. In the case of his Radius, it was the feeling of a classic Porshe; in the case of Via Matta, a rotary in Milan.

Christopher Myers kindly invited Apicella (and Croma owner Andrew Bullock) over to his “house,” Via Matta. So what happened? A lot more than what is recorded here, both because of translation difficulties and off-the-record revelations. You shoulda been there…

CHRISTOPHER: Is it true that you make a sketch and then hand it to the architect and he builds it from there?

ENZO: Yes.

CHRISTOPHER: When you’re going to design a space, do you deal with the conceptual architecture in your mind of what that restaurant is going to be, or do you deal with the space that you’re given?

ENZO: It depends on the place, but I do most of the architectural work about certain things, knocking down the walls and things like that. But technical details, most people who design a restaurant don’t know much about architecture.

CHRISTOPHER: Let me ask you, when you are designing a restaurant what’s the first kernel of inspiration that you start with?

ENZO: The most important thing for me is to go around the area to discover what is available, then to find out what is really missing in that place. A few nights ago, for example, I was by myself and I wanted to read something while I was eating. I could not find a place around my hotel that had enough light to read. It was like when I was in England in the fifties where eating was really a bad thing, that nobody should see you eating or drinking, so everything was poorly lit. After looking around the area, I thought there must be a lot of people who want to have a pizza or a meal in a very light atmosphere.

CHRISTOPHER: So you think of the business as well as your aesthetic interests? You go around and see what’s open…

ENZO: Yes, because all around (Boston’s) Newbury Street there is all this mahogany, dark wood and things, so I designed this restaurant more or less with the look of light and white. Also, I thought it would be on Newbury Street, so I want to say something about that style, so I got the brick walls, but not naked. I put a lot of white ceramic tiles so there would be as much light as possible.

CHRISTOPHER: Are you a trained designer and architect, or are you self-taught?

ENZO: I worked on television as a set designer. This taught me a lot about lighting. My fixation is on the light in the center of the table, where you have the dark here and the light there, to see light shining on the glass of wine and things like that. I remember in England, ladies do not like the overall light, because at that time when I was designing in England there were no spotlights and everything was very low voltage. One day walking around Piccadilly I found a magazine shop that was shining a beautiful light I had never seen before, and they called this light “window display light,” and it was used only in the shops. I thought, why not have them in the restaurants? I was the first one to have this kind of lighting in the restaurant over the table, and that was an incredible success.

CHRISTOPHER: I think the detail to work with is the detail in your mind that’s what I call “conceptual architecture.” It’s what you want that business to do, how you want it to perform, what you want the mise en scène, the atmosphere to be like. That’s the architecture I think is the most important, so how do you communicate that to the person that is going to design it for you?

ENZO: You must understand that eighty percent of architects are criminals. In this country, I like the idea that when architects design big dance clubs and things like that, they always use a color consultant. In England that does not exist. The architect thinks he can do anything, including interior decoration, and that is very bad. Architects know too many things about mathematics and things like that so they don’t know about the pretty things. Which is one of the reasons why I never want to do architecture, because architecture is structure. I don’t want to know anything about the mathematics.

CHRISTOPHER: I hear you have lunch and dinner out everyday without any take-out. How many years have you been eating out?

ENZO: Since I was thirty-five. I’ll tell you something very interesting…the lighting on this table is perfect. But how many people go into a restaurant and feel uneasy because of the way the table is lighted? They feel uneasy but they don’t know why. I’ve been in some restaurants where the ladies were eating their soup without being able to see what they were eating. But that’s why I call some architects criminals because their measurements are completely wrong all the time.

CHRISTOPHER: When you design your restaurants, are you involved in the music?

ENZO: No. But if it were up to me, I would have no music at all. They’ve done studies that show if you have classical music, the average bill goes up. So some background music is good, but in Italy it’s frowned upon. It has nothing to do with the volume of the music, but the kind of music that is played. Not because I think popular music is bad, but the rhythm of the music is wrong for the restaurant. You know what I’m saying? Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. There was a study some time ago that found out that many restaurants were playing jazz music because it made the people eat faster, so they leave the place faster. It is a thing to be played in a place where you are drinking and want to be excited. It’s the wrong thing to play in a place where you are going to have a nice meal, relax and you want to talk.

CHRISTOPHER: How old is your girlfriend may I ask?

ENZO: Forty. Twenty years we’ve been together.

CHRISTOPHER: You’ve been together twenty years? Since she was twenty. So you have an eye for talent.

ENZO: Yes.