Restaurants, Cafés, And Bars Redefining Global Flavor

New restaurants, cafés, and bars around the world showcase inspiring form, function, and globetrotting flavor.

Taste Makers From New Delhi To Paris

Seoul

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South Korean food is vibrant and sometimes messy, with grilling at the table, so durability became a driver at this New Delhi restaurant by Urban Mistrii where every design gesture is purpose-driven and rooted in culture: Stone tabletops are nonporous and copper-painted steel chimneys specifically conceived for hot-pot dining extract smoke and oil from the air—both elements bringing authenticity to the space. Walls of polished mango wood and textured paint backdrop artworks referencing traditional Korean paintings in which multiple stories unfold within a single frame.

The Facets

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For the renovation of a café located on the grounds of a jewelry store in Chiang Mai, Thailand, crystalline glass blocks replace existing solid walls, and furniture such as tables of tinted acrylic and hammered metal laminate draw inspiration from raw gems. The highlight, however, is in the garden: BB Workspace adds acrylic panels coated with dichroic film dangle from a steel-framed seating pavilion, shimmering with iridescence and subtly shifting hues in relation to the angle of the sun, evoking the color and fire of diamonds, amethysts, garnets, emeralds, and sapphires.

Javier’s

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For a lively Los Angeles restaurant designed by Gulla Jónsdóttir Architecture & Design and inspired by the architectural soul of historic Mexican churches—their textures, proportions, and quiet grandeur—a tall, white-stucco entry arch creates an immediate sense of reverence and is a motif that continues in the walnut portals surrounding bottle shelving behind the bar. Nearby, a hand-troweled plaster tunnel to the restrooms stretches long and narrow, dramatically up-lit by linear floor lights and terminating in Los Angeles metal artist Scot Brown’s bronze candle-holding sculpture inspired by cathedral organ pipes.

Café Nuances

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Inspired by 20th-century French artist César Baldaccini, known for his sculptures made from compacted automobiles and discarded metal, Harry Nuriev’s New York–and Paris-based Crosby Studios crushed Inox stainless-steel coffee cups before adhering them to stools and the bar face of the jewel-box coffee shop located on the ground floor of a limestone-clad 1950’s residential Paris building, the brand’s fifth location. Warming the steel’s industrial quality is the rear wall, aglow in gradient orange, Nuances’s signature color. 

Florentin

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Accessed through an unmarked alley door, then an elevator ride to the eighth floor, this Mediterranean rooftop bar by Preen serves as a respite from DTLA’s glinting skyscrapers, with walls finished in dusty-coral plaster and a snaking custom banquette, half of it upholstered in graphic black and white, the other in a botanical pattern. Further nodding to the destination’s name, which is Latin for in flower, verdant green defines the grand glazed-tile bar and its matte-painted arched alcove—something owner Brandon Robinson knew he wanted from the outset.

Marcus DC

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Rockwell Group alumna Kamille Glenn, founder of maker collective dsgnrs.wrkshp and now her own design studio dsgnrs.studio, honors cultural narratives on every surface at chef Marcus Samuelsson’s new eatery in Washington DC: “It was important to share sentiments of home, heritage, and connection from the Black gaze,” she says. The bar-back mural is by Derrick Adams while on walls, Studio Jeannot patterns were customized to evoke the rhythm and vibrancy of textiles from Ethiopia, Samuelsson’s country of birth. Below, a relief map pays homage to almanac author and surveyor Benjamin Banneker, who helped draw the boundaries of the nation’s capital in 1791.