Sendai, Japan
Atelier Hitoshi Abe + Hitoshi Abe

Deep inside the Aoba-Tei restaurant, Hitoshi Abe’s design evokes dappled
sunlight filtering through an allée of trees

	Click images to view larger
	Photo © Shinkenchiku-Sha
	Principal: Hitoshi Abe
	Click here to see the people & products

Aoba-tei may be more than 200 miles from Tokyo, but the exclusive French restaurant is anything but provincial. Set in Sendai, a city of 1.2 million, this dining venue features a design by Hitoshi Abe, Sendai’s own architectural wunderkind. The two-story interior combines a technological feat with a magical aura. Here, a multitude of tiny lights shines through the space’s sophisticated S-shaped volume, defined by a continuous, curving sheet of perforated steel. Embedded in the base of a seven-story, steel-framed office building, kitty-corner from Toyo Ito’s Mediateque [RECORD, May 2001, page 190], the restaurant is the architectural jewel of an entrepreneur who made his fortune mass-producing the local delicacy: beef tongue. But tongue is for the hoi polloi. And Aoba-tei is strictly haute cuisine.

Abe got the commission after the hamburger joint in the existing building went belly up, freeing the lower two floors—a total of 2,370 square feet—for his client to lease. The architect’s desire to connect the two levels seamlessly inspired him to insert a second cocoonlike skin, encapsulating an autonomous space. Within the shell, a large hole in the upper floor allows the stair’s twisting treads to lead from the reception area, on the ground floor, to the 30-seat dining room above. Here, invitation-only epicures sup at Abe-designed, walnut “cow” tables or, as is preferred in Japan, the counter, where they can chat with the proprietor—an important component of a good meal. The counter, a massive hunk of walnut, makes its way through the room, morphing into a five-seat bar at one end and pointing toward an open grill at the other. The actual kitchen, designed by Aoba-tei’s celebrity chef, lies sequestered behind the steel screen.

The architect wanted to relate the restaurant directly to the street—a six-lane commercial artery lined with gracefully shading Zelkova trees—but did not have permission to alter the existing curtain-wall facade. His solution was to distill an image of the trees into an abstract pattern of dots, and then punch them into a steel screen.

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our September 2005 issue.
Subscribe to Architectural Record in print, or get Architectural Record digitally

Read more about the people and products behind this project.