Eat's Food-store e Bistrò | Studioversuro. Gianpaolo Versuro

 April, 2018. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the concept store Eat’s – 2008-2018 – we want to pay tribute to this idea with a new photo array of the most important and representative Eat’s food store, on the day of its inauguration.

The purpose of the design is the orientation of a next-generation restaurant towards a shopping mall. Eat’s cooking offers the flavours and the smells of the traditional cuisine revisited creatively based on the contemporary taste, using high-quality products, which come directly from the benches of its food store. The concept refers to this idea of blending the restaurant and the market and wants to make palpable, in a modern shopping center, the suggestion to be in a “market” where it is possible to choose the ingredients that will be used later in the restaurant kitchen. The restaurant area has been organised around the central hole, fulcrum of the composition, with the purpose to invite the customers to enter the suggestion that evokes the combination of restaurant and market: the disposition of the tables has been specifically studied for making enjoyable the vivacity of the market downstairs to the customer of the restaurant, and to invite him to continue his culinary itinerary inside the market, to purchase the fresh products he has been able to consume sitting at the table.

The project searches for a spatiality characterized by ambiguous boundaries, permeable to the look, that visually unites the restaurant and the sale zone, in an open dimension that doesn’t hide anything of the creative process of the gastronomic experience. To underline this bond, in the empty space between the two floors is the choreographic presence of the rain of lights that creates the effect of many small candles contained in floating water bubbles. Thanks to the “organic” consistency of the molten glass, hand-worked therefore imperfect, the light, from the center of the sphere, interacts with the dents, the imperfections and the air bubbles of the glass casting an intense bright halo.

The show-cooking (the kitchen) consists of functional islands, that follow each other in a succession based on different production phases, in a single area separated from the main room by a full-height vertical panel made of wood, steel and glass, whose transparency frames the view of the creative production of dishes and of the high technology of a professional laboratory.

The choice of the materials underlines the aspects of naturalness, authenticity and tradition typical of contexts of the traditional cuisine, without relinquishing a modern and sophisticated design. The essential nature and minimalism represent the guiding principles for a place that wants to be the perfect alternative to the Milanese fast-life. The predominant colour is grey, with all its shades, as synonym of elegance. For the materials, it stands out the use of the shiny steel to underline the high technology of a professional laboratory, just like the wide use of a natural material like the textured durmast obtained with “filosega” treatment, in order to lend the location that tone of tradition coherent with the concept that supports it.

The layout that strengthens the concept of spaces that meld and visually unite like elements necessary to one another in the gastronomic experience of the consumer. At night, when the market closes, the visual impact of its furnitures becomes even stronger because it is highlighted by the effects created by the artificial lighting coming from the coloured light diffusers, creating an atmosphere of suffused lighting on completion of the scenographic central lights, which shape a “cloud” of lights hanging between the two floors.

September 2011.