Illuminating Ideas: Put Your Restaurant in the Best Light (Restaurants USA, February 1999)

February 1999 issue

Illuminating Ideas: Put Your Restaurant in the Best Light

Restaurants USA magazine's final issue was published in September 2002 but these archived articles remain available for our readers' convenience.

Restaurants USA, February 1999

Whether you want to put the spotlight on your food, your decor or your service, the proper lighting is paramount. But experts say lighting is often one of the first budget items to go when money gets tight. We'll show you how using the right lighting really is a bright idea.
By Lynda McDaniel

Imagine Notre Dame cathedral flooded with fluorescent light. Or the Louvre so dimly lit that the masterpieces meld with the dark. That’s what restaurateur Carmelo Mauro means when he says, “You can have the most beautiful art on earth, but unless you have the right lighting to highlight those beauties, you have wasted your money.” Of course, the art he’s talking about is the food, the architecture—and yes, even the customers—at Carmelo’s, his award-winning Italian restaurant in Houston.

Working with architect Kamran Mouzoon, Mauro constructed a representation of the Italian village, Taormina, where he was born. It’s a place where he says the weary traveler can find both refuge and enchantment in the romantic atmosphere magically created by backlit windows, a glowing bell tower and a dreamy star-studded sky.
Lighting can do all that and more. It can create an ambience that either soothes or energizes as it spotlights the food and flatters the customer. It can help to turn tables quickly or encourage guests to linger. It can attract seniors, Generation Next or any age group in between—if you put the spotlight on your lighting needs.

Don’t hide your light under a bushel—or a budget

Since lighting has such power, you’d expect it to figure prominently in restaurant budgets; but according to Charles Morris Mount, a Manhattan-based interior designer, bean-counters are frequently in the dark about the importance of lighting.

“One of my pet peeves in life is that lighting is often on the end of the budget. Lighting is the first thing to get cut, because the budget won’t support a $100 fixture that will do x-y-z as opposed to a $25 fixture the contractor wants to use,” he says. “People don’t always realize what an important role lighting plays in how a restaurant sells.”

Over the past 20 years, Mount has designed hundreds of attention-getting and award-winning restaurants around the world, ranging from fast food to upscale. One of his latest, Milos in Midtown Manhattan, honors the Greek heritage of its owner Costas Spiliadis. “I wanted to recall as much of the Greek Isle idea as possible, though Milos is not a theme restaurant,” Mount explains. “Costas flies in fish from all over the world every day—Tunisia, Florida, France—and he creates a display of fish that makes Harry Winston’s jewels look paltry. It’s like a work of art, so I designed a 12-foot-long marble-and-crushed-ice display with lighting to set it off.”

In the dining areas, Mount used the light fixtures themselves—Greek fishermen’s lamps, 30-inches in diameter with large glass globes and baked-enamel shades—to further develop the atmosphere. “I wanted to marry elements of design and food,” Mount continues, “and to me, Milos comes together with perfect lighting and perfect food. They say the same thing—that quality runs throughout. The ambience is very simple, in order to let the food come forward.”

High-tech highlights

At Carmelo’s, state-of-the-art fiber-optic lighting is an essential element in the Italian-village atmosphere that defies the strip shopping center just outside. In fact, Carmelo’s was given the 1998 Edwin F. Guth Memorial Award for Interior Lighting Special Citation for Fiber Optic Wall Lighting by the International Illumination Design Awards Program.

Although the lighting budget for Carmelo’s was more than $80,000, Mouzoon stresses that the use of fiber optics is cost-effective. “The fiber-optics system sounds elaborate, but it is not expensive. It allows you to light many locations from one source of light. Basically, there is a central illuminator box with a very strong light bulb and hair-thin glass or plastic fiber-optic strands coming from the box. The more strands you bundle together, the more light you get. There is no electricity transfer, which means the light is completely cool—an important consideration for hot climates like Houston.”

Mouzoon explains that the lower cost of installing fiber optics is what gives it the advantage over incandescent lighting. For example, 120 light openings with incandescent lighting would run $15,000 installed, in comparison with $13,000 for fiber optics.

Glowing reviews

If you’re thinking such inventive lighting is just for big-budget, high-ticket restaurants, think again. Mount has designed six McDonald’s in Manhattan with budgets that are actually lower than that of the franchise’s more traditional design. The owner of the McDonald’s units, Irwin S. Kruger, first worked with Mount on his Rockefeller Plaza restaurant 13 years ago, a collaboration that has cast a new glow on an established icon.

“The question is, is it fast food or food fast?” Kruger asks. “I think that the architecture and lighting have given us the opportunity to shift that balance around. It’s not just about consumption on the run. We got away from the fluorescent fixtures that McDonald’s has become famous for and went off in new directions with low-voltage lighting that is softer, more natural and much more soothing. It’s not uncommon for CEOs to come into our restaurants because of their locations and conduct business as though they were going to a tablecloth restaurant. And we hear young children say, ‘This is the most beautiful McDonald’s!’ Everyone seems to love it.”

Besides creating an ambience that fits the food, lighting can cast the right—or wrong—light on the food itself. Horror stories circulate in the industry about poorly chosen lighting that can turn rich cream sauces gray, make prime steaks look green and transform customers into ghouls.

“With restaurant design, flattering the guest is the most important consideration—even more than the food—because guests are usually dining with someone else, and if they look good, the food usually looks good,” says architect Keith Youngquist, a principal with Aumiller and Youngquist, a restaurant-design firm in the Chicago area. “The standard fare is to put the light straight over the table—but if you use a widespread spot fixture, the light bounces off guests’ heads and gives them a depressed look. If they look depressed, then the whole scene begins to crumble. If the light is coming from underneath, like shining a flashlight under your chin, then you get this ghostlike look and everything looks sick. There’s a magic to bringing the light from the sides so that the complexion looks great. That is absolutely key.”

Restaurateurs should also pay attention to the lighting in ancillary spaces of the restaurant, such as women’s bathrooms and entrances, cautions Cheryl Brantner of Brantner Design Associates, an architectural and design firm in Los Angeles. “There are often mirrors in these public spaces, and people have to look good in the way the lighting catches their reflection,” Brantner explains. “This will frequently determine the way people feel about themselves that evening, how they go about being good dinner companions, and how that translates to the success of the meal and the experience. We concentrate on trying to make women look beautiful, and though that may sound silly to some people, I don’t think it’s a small detail in the big scheme of things.”

An illuminating experience

The proper lighting can actually help put a restaurant in the black. Business at Carmelo’s increased 48 percent from 1996 to 1997 and 51.7 percent from 1997 to 1998, when the three-stage remodeling was completed. “When customers walk in, they say, ‘Wow, this is so beautiful,’” Mauro adds. “They really get excited, and that makes them already feel good. So when we serve the food and wine and the music plays, everything comes together as it should.”

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Lynda McDaniel writes for Restaurants USA from Washington DC.