I'LL HAVE THE THEATRICAL THRILL

INTERIORS

Forget the plush, hushed

dining rooms of old, and the

over-hyped eateries of the

designer years. Lucas Hollweg

finds that today's diners are

after good food and exciting

design, both in equal measure

EATING OUT: it's the rock'n'roll of the Nineties - or is that comedy, or poetry? Regardless of the cliches, though, London's restaurants and bars are throbbing to capacity with bright young urban things. This boom in popularity has been fuelled in large part by a new generation of globally-inspired chefs, producing some of the best food in the world - a fact that even the French newspaper Le Monde has grudgingly acknowledged. But some credit must also go to the design world for creating spaces that have abandoned the hushed murmur of traditional dining rooms in favour of an almost theatrical thrill. Restaurants, ever more innovative and ambitious in scale, aren't just about a gastronomic experience, but eating as entertainment.

But doesn't this sound a bit familiar? The Eighties, after all, was the "designer" decade, when architect Chaik Chassay created the interiors of west London restaurant 192 and Soho's media hangout, the Groucho Club, and Julyan Wickham did the same for Kensington Place and the now defunct members' clubs, Zanzibar and Fred's. Wickham, who has been applying what he describes as "hard-boiled modern design" for 30 years, argues that while high-design restaurants are not a phenomenon peculiar to the Nineties, the cultural context in which they operate has changed. "I'm interested in the late 20th century," he says, "but specifically in 1997, in what people want right now."

When Zanzibar opened in 1977, it was against an economic backdrop of infinite expense accounts and five-hour lunches. Eating in the right places was one more way to show just how well you were doing. But since the mid- Nineties, when the economy finally started to emerge from recession, dining out has enjoyed a more widespread appeal, and restaurants have had to adopt a more democratic approach.

"A restaurateur now has to aim at the market in general," claims Wickham. "He doesn't want to discriminate about who will come in." The design is fundamental in flagging that fact to the public. In common with several other recent restaurants, Wickham's latest, Bank, uses a visible symbol of its accessibility. A glass front allows passers- by to look through into the big, bright interior, which is dominated by primary-coloured pillars and a vast glass ceiling sculpture. "The use of colour is important," says Wickham. "I see Bank as a kind of playground. People want to go back to the nursery when they are off duty."

Sir Terence Conran, whose high-design mega-eateries have probably done the most to transform the capital's restaurant scene over the last decade, believes Londoners now view eating out in much the same way as a night at the theatre or the cinema. While the quality of food and service always have to come first, the way a restaurant looks, and the atmosphere it evokes, are all part of the package. "I believe that design has an important role to play in creating a buzz, a sense of theatricality, occasion and glamour," he says.

It is such design theatrics, whether on a large or small scale, that provide the common thread between many new restaurants. Sometimes the theatre comes with the territory. Oxo, one of last year's most talked about London openings, situated on the top floor of the Oxo building on the south bank of the Thames, affords diners spectacular views of the river and the city beyond. Never mind the fact that the chairs are by mid-century American designers Bertoia and Eames, or that the bar is padded in blue leather. The view alone provides all the drama that's needed.

But in cases where such ready-made cinematographic effects are missing, designers are providing them. Quaglino's, the first of Conran's giants, which opened nearly four years ago, is a case in point. A sweeping staircase which leads into the dining hall ensures that every diner makes a grand entrance. New arrivals descend in full view of the 300 diners seated among the mural-covered columns below. The same happens at Conran's 670-seater Soho eaterie, Mezzo, where a semi- spiral staircase leads from the ground floor's canteen-style space to the more intimate downstairs restaurant. Mannequin-like cigarette girls and the bellhop garb of the waiting staff add to the impression that you've just landed a role as an extra in a Busby Berkeley musical.

Conran is not alone in promoting dramatic design as an integral part of the dining experience. Oliver Peyton, one of a younger generation of street-wise restaurateurs, proved his theatrical credentials at The Atlantic Bar and Grill, a vast 1920s ocean liner of a space beneath the Regent Palace Hotel. It is one of the most glamorous restaurant interiors in town. Peyton believes that creating a new design vernacular for British restaurants is an important part of improving their general image, both at home and abroad. "Restaurants in this country used to be crap: they had pink table cloths and looked like mock Tudor chateaux," he says. "I'm interested in doing stuff that will give Britain its own restaurant history, rather than being seen as just a copy."

Peyton's "stuff" includes a London restaurant, Coast, and a restaurant- bar combination in Manchester called Mash & Air. Both are designed by Australian Marc Newson. At Coast, a former car showroom, Newson transformed the emptiness with organically-shaped staircases and Sixties- inspired chairs and tables in bright yellow and plum. From inside the pale green walls - part schoolroom, part sci-fi - diners look out on to a salubrious Mayfair Street, at the people looking in at them. At Mash & Air bright orange brewing equipment, visible through the walls of the in-house microbrewery, links the three-storey bar (Mash) with the restaurant (Air) on the top floor. Peyton's commissioning of leading designers and architects to shape his projects is set to continue in his future ventures, which include a vast new restaurant in Knightsbridge, currently awaiting planning permission, and another in the West End. He is rumoured to be talking to Zaha Hadid, architect of the ill-fated Cardiff Opera House, and possibly Marc Newson about the respective jobs.

Projects like Peyton's are high-budget affairs. But according to architect Sally Mackereth, of Wells Mackereth, more interesting is the way in which design teams are conjuring up equally theatrical ideas that rely more on inventiveness than vast quantities of cash, with designers looking for subtler ways to inject atmosphere into interiors. "There is something very different going on from the glitz of the Eighties," says Mackereth. "People still like the theatre of restaurants, but you now have to be clever in the way you create it. You can't waste money on things . In the same way that food has become more honest - there's a move towards kitchens being open, for example, so you can actually see your steak being cooked - so has design. It's not about being worthy, but it is about using materials more ingeniously."

Mackereth's practice was behind The Polygon Bar and Grill, a small restaurant on the site of an old bookmakers in south London, which opened late last year. The interior has the usual modern design clues - stainless steel, white walls, a wooden floor - but these work as counterpoints to more unconventional materials. The bar is sculpted from concrete, and a banquette-cum-wall adjacent to a wall-length mirror gives the impression of an infinitely extended space. "We are trying to use the materials in an unexpected way," says Mackereth. "Raw concrete alongside leather gives the space an unexpected luxury. You wouldn't have seen that sort of combination in a restaurant five years ago." The Polygon's exterior plays similar tricks, with a striking facade that, according to Mackereth, creates the same sense of having arrived as a restaurant with a valet parking service. The front of the building has been remodelled, re-rendered and uplit with a subtle wash of blue light that catches the passing trade even those negotiating the lane-changing as they drive around Clapham Common. "The outside shows that it's a contemporary restaurant serving contemporary food," she says, "but it's not about putting it in neon across the front of the building."

Mackereth hopes that the blend of materials used at The Polygon will allow the interior to age gracefully. "What's lovely about natural materials is that people can't say, 'That's so Nineties'," she says. "Concrete and leather will look nicer three years down the line. There's a sense of durability. Precious interiors that cost a lot and are unchangeable are dangerous. Restaurants really get hammered. Pissed-up people do not respect lovely white minimalism."

With ever increasing sums being spent on the look of restaurants (Bank cost pounds 1.6 million for the architectural and design elements alone; the Bladerunner interior of the Covent Garden moules and frites emporium, Belgo Centraal, designed by Ron Arad Associates, came with a pounds 1.5 million price tag), the danger is that they will soon look old hat. What is to say that in five years Marc Newson's back-to-the-future spaces will still seem so exciting? Oliver Peyton believes that they will. "We might have to change certain things, but I commissioned them on the basis that they would be there for a long time." Restaurant-goers are notoriously fickle and if something newer and more exciting comes along, the in-crowd tend to migrate en masse. On the other hand, Kensington Place, designed in 1987 and still drawing the crowds, has stood the test of time. It suggests that good design (combined with good food) does survive.

A restaurant somehow has to capture the prevailing mood if it is to pull the punters in the first place. Paul Daly, the designer of restaurant- bar-club Saint, which opened in the West End last year, reckons that design both mirrors and influences other areas of British culture. "Restaurants have to be a window on to what's happening on the streets and in fashion," he says. "The colours I used at Saint ended up on the catwalks. I'm not saying that is where they came from, but it was part of a parallel trend."

Saint is bright, poppy and modern, yet obviously influenced by a lava- lamp view of Seventies fashion and design. "I was a teenager in the Seventies," says Daly. "Suddenly all the things that I loved are coming around again, but done with Nineties attitude. It's not retro, but it brings to mind that time." Daly understandably hopes that his design will have the necessary staying power, although even he has his doubts. "I like Saint," he says, "but it could be too fashionable."

Daly is right about one thing. At its cutting edge, the restaurant interior is setting the agenda for design, carving out new trends rather than simply responding to them. The rough-smooth aesthetic used in The Polygon, for instance, is being touted in modern interiors magazines as one of the major up-coming looks. Among the design fraternity, the chance to shape a restaurant is, unsurprisingly, seen as something that is not to be missed. "Instead of doing a brochure, you do a restaurant," says Oliver Peyton. "It's a shop window. People who commission design also eat out. This is how they are introduced to a designer's work."

For young practitioners, such as Daly, it also provides the opportunity and the budget to develop new ideas. The K Secret Agent collection of furniture - designed for his latest project, Kassoulet, a new bar and restaurant in west London with a look that he calls Desert Storm Chic - can be commissioned for domestic interiors. Marc Newson's chairs for Coast are also available to buy, and there is a stock of his aluminium ice buckets for those who become so besotted with its fat-bottomed shape over lunch that they really have to take one home. As for the ashtrays, people just pinch them. If eating out is the new rock'n'roll, then ashtrays are the new tour T-shirts. !