restaurants and bars

   Alternative places to eat and drink have appeared in Britain over the last twenty years. The changes in licensing laws, the appetite for international foods, the increase in numbers of professional women workers, the delay in getting married or having children, and the general increase in spending power and sophistication have all made the traditional British pub and cafe outmoded. British cities have consequently broken out in a rash of theme bars and continental cafes. Many of these are open plan and feature long bars, thus different from the usual pub design which aims to give drinkers privacy rather than public display (the trend to visibility is exemplified in Tchaik Chassay’s Groucho Club in Soho (1984)). Following Julyan Wickham’s Zanzibar (1976), restaurants and bars are now designed by architects almost as often as interior designers. Typical examples are Eva Jiricna’s Le Caprice near the Ritz (1981) and Rick Mather’s Zen in Hampstead (1985). Most of these have been influenced by architecture in other countries, particularly New York high-tech chic (for example, Jiricna’s Joe’s Cafe in Brompton (1985)) and Japanese minimalism (Nigel Coates’s industrial baroque style developed in Tokyo).

   See also: office buildings; shops

   Further reading

    Glancey, J. (1989) New British Architecture, London: Thames & Hudson.

   PETER CHILDS