The ceiling we couldn’t remove

For most of a decade, the same chef stood behind the sushi bar at a restaurant David Webber ate at regularly. His name is Charlie Wang.

At some point Charlie left to open his own place, Craft Omakase. It won a Michelin star before it had been open a year. David went in to congratulate him and asked what was next. Charlie said a second location. That is the whole story of how Webber + Studio got this job.

Craft Nori is that second location, and it is deliberately the opposite of the first. Craft Omakase is a fixed menu, two seatings a night, and priced accordingly.

Craft Nori is hand rolls, made in front of you and handed straight across the counter, at something a neighborhood can do on a weeknight. The brief Charlie kept returning to was that it should feel unpretentious.

That is a harder brief than the opposite one. Casual takes more restraint, not less. The answer turned out to be sitting in the ceiling, in the one part of the room nobody could get rid of.

Why this room and not another

It is a long, narrow ground floor space on South First, under an apartment building from around 2013, with glass down one whole side and a fifteen foot ceiling. It had been a pho restaurant that went out of business, and it had been sitting empty since.

What made it work was not the shape. It was that the kitchen was already there, with a range and a hood in place. Putting those in new is a long permitting exercise and a lot of money, and and on a project of this size it would probably have ended the conversation. A space that has already been a restaurant is worth more than it looks.

The thing that could not be removed

A dropped ceiling ran most of the length of the room, stuffed with mechanical services. It could not come out. With fifteen feet overhead nobody wanted it to, because a room that tall needs something bringing it down to the height of a person eating.

So the framing stayed and was re-clad, and that re-cladding turned into the entire project. A wood surface that starts low at the bar, curves overhead and runs the length of the room.

Behind the curve is the ductwork. The gaps between the boards are the supply registers. The air arrives through the ceiling you are looking at rather than through a grille everyone has agreed to ignore.

Where the wood came from

It is a traditional Japanese cladding technique, close to what most people would recognize as board and batten, except that the vertical ribs do structural work rather than cover a joint. One reason it exists is that the whole panel can be built flat on the ground and lifted into place, instead of being assembled piece by piece in the air.

Modern versions of it are not rare. Curved ones are. Bending a tradition is more interesting than copying one accurately.

Designed for the builder on the job

The general contractor here is, above everything else, a woodworker. So the question asked early was what this particular builder is good at, and the design went into that.

It worked. He was pleased to be doing it, which is not a small thing. A different contractor handed the same drawings would have found the corners to cut, and every one of them would show.

What people see in it

The intention was narrow. Take the Japanese technique and bend it. Everything else arrived on its own.

Someone said Viking ship, because of the ribs and the curve. David Webber has described standing in the room as being under an upturned boat. Somebody else saw fish scales, which in a restaurant full of fish is hardly a complaint. More than one person has assumed it refers to the bamboo mat a hand roll is rolled on, which is a better idea than the one the studio actually had.

All of them are welcome.

Three or four materials, and that is the lot

The references Charlie sent first were casual and busy, which was the right instinct pushed a little far. The studio showed them back to him with a different view, that the room would read as cluttered, and made the case for the opposite.

The argument was simple. The food is extremely colorful. So are the people. If the room competes with either, everybody loses. The palette is tonal and quiet on purpose, and the whole scheme runs on a handful of materials.

One tile, used almost everywhere, with a smaller version of the same tile at the bar. Maple at the bar, carried across from Craft Omakase, because it is durable and because it makes the two rooms relatives. The gray plaster at the back came from the first restaurant too. Then the wood overhead, and that is close to all of it.

Not everything survived. Green acoustic panels were meant to hang in the tall part of the ceiling, doing a job and looking like something. They were cut. Color now arrives through the fabric in the kitchen and bathroom doorways, and through the food.

How you sit

The bar runs about sixty feet and seats more than twenty. Two or three chefs work behind it building hand rolls and passing them across, which is the reason to sit there. At the back there is a banquette and tables for larger groups, and a wood shelf that acts as a service pass, where a server waits for a plate and carries it through.

Charlie originally wanted almost nothing but bar. The studio argued for the banquette, he liked it more than anyone expected, and then asked for more of it.

Opening

Craft Nori opens at 3715 South First Street. The photographs here were taken while the room was still being finished. Webber + Studio will come back with proper ones once it is open and full of people, which is the only state a restaurant should really be photographed in.