Barry knew what CERU should taste like. Deciding what it should feel like — how to
design a London restaurant around years of travel through the Eastern Mediterranean
without turning it into a museum of the journey — became my question to answer.

“By Patricia Hilton, Co-Founder, CERU Restaurants”

It was Barry who started the conversation, over a bottle of wine that had more or less followed us
home from Beirut, when he asked the only question he thinks matters at the start of any restaurant:
what should this taste like. I told him, not unkindly, that food was his half of the sentence. Mine
was what should this feel like — a different, much slower question, and one that takes
considerably longer to answer over a kitchen table than it does to ask. Don’t be upset, boys.
Someone has to choose the chairs.
That kitchen-table conversation, and several that followed it, became the starting point for the
design of every CERU dining room since. Barry and I had spent years travelling together through
the Levant — the spice markets of Istanbul, the mezze tables of Beirut, the wine terraces of
Cyprus, the stone courtyards of Jordan — and Barry came home certain about flavour and unsure
of almost nothing else. I came home from the same places looking at entirely different things: the
worn brass of a door handle in the Beirut souks, the exact blue of a tiled stairwell in Nicosia, a
curtain in an Amman guesthouse that had clearly been mended by hand more than once, and
beautifully. Two people can take the same trip together and come home with two different jobs to
do.

Reference, Not Reproduction

The trouble with bringing any of that back to a dining room in London is that the Eastern
Mediterranean has given the world so much pattern, so much ornament, so much history folded
into objects, that it is easy to drown in it. Put too much of that world into one room and you have
built a stage set, not a restaurant. People come to eat. They did not ask for a diorama of somewhere
they have never been.
So the question Barry and I kept returning to, at that table and several after it, was how to keep the
reference without keeping the reproduction — how many traditional pieces a room can hold before
it stops being a restaurant and starts being a re-enactment. It is a question with no formula attached
to it. You feel your way toward the answer, one object at a time, and you are wrong more often than you would like before you are right.

“Too many traditional pieces and you’ve built a museum. None at all, and

you’ve built nowhere in particular.”

Colour, Decided Twice

Barry, to his credit, is the one with an eye for colour. He will stop mid-sentence in a market to
point out how a fading blue shutter sits against sun-bleached stone, and he is nearly always right.
Most of CERU’s palette began as his instinct — cerulean pulled from Mediterranean water and
Levantine tilework, a warm gold that could have come from brass trays or late afternoon light,
depending on which of us you ask.
But instinct is not the same as a decision. Somewhere between his eye and the final swatch, the job
became mine: narrowing six blues down to one, deciding how much gold is generous and how
much is simply gaudy, and where in a room the eye is meant to land first. It is a palette that now
runs consistently through South Kensington, Queensway and Farringdon ; three different rooms,
answering to three different streets, held together by the same two colours.

Furniture You’re Not Meant to Notice

Once the palette was settled, the harder work began — the parts of a room you are not meant to
notice, which is precisely why they take the longest. Soft furnishing was the first argument I had
with myself. Too hard a seat and no one lingers over a second glass of wine, which in a restaurant
built around long, unhurried meals is close to a design failure. Too soft, and you lose the posture
;the slight formality ;that makes a meal feel considered rather than collapsed into.
I wanted chairs that hold you upright without holding you hostage: something closer to how you’d
sit at a good friend’s table than in a boardroom, or on a sofa. It sounds like a small distinction. It is
the difference between a chair a guest notices and one they simply sit in for two hours without a
second thought, which is exactly the point.

Tables Built for Sharing

The tables took longer still. Levantine hospitality is built around sharing ; mezze passed hand to
hand, plates that multiply as the evening goes on and a room full of identical square tables for
two works against that instinct before a single dish has arrived. So we mixed round tables in among
the rest: tables that invite a chair to be pulled in from somewhere else, that let four become six
without anyone standing up to rearrange the room.

It is a small piece of geometry doing a great deal of social work, and it is the kind of detail no guest
consciously registers, which is usually the sign that a design decision has done its job properly.

The Room No One Designs on Purpose

And then the bathrooms, which I will defend as the most important rooms in any restaurant, and
the ones designers are most tempted to neglect. Clean is the minimum, not the achievement. I
wanted ours to be memorable; genuinely, specifically memorable, the kind of room a guest
mentions on the way back to the table, half-laughing, saying you have to see the bathroom.
That takes more thought than it should: an unexpected tile, a mirror with some real presence, light
that flatters rather than interrogates. It is the one room in the building where a guest is alone with
the design without the food, the wine or the company to carry the moment and I have never
understood why so many restaurants treat it as an afterthought.

A Design Philosophy Across Three Postcodes

None of this is really about design in the abstract. It is about what we brought home from the
Levant, together, and what I decided to do with it ; keeping enough of a place that guests feel
they have travelled somewhere, without asking them to sit inside a replica of it. The rooms at
South Kensington, Queensway and Farringdon are not the same room three times over, but they are
answering the same question, the one that started at our kitchen table: what should this feel like.
There is a version of this essay that ends with a design manifesto, and I have tried to write it more
than once. It never survives contact with an actual dining room. What survives is smaller, and
harder to plan for in advance: a chair Barry sat in without noticing it was comfortable, a blue that
made a stranger ask where it came from, a bathroom mirror that stopped someone mid-sentence on
their way back to the table. Good design in a restaurant rarely announces itself. It simply makes
people want to stay a little longer than they had planned to.
Barry still believes the more interesting question is what a dish should taste like. I have come
round to thinking the two questions were never really separate, that a room has to make a guest
want to sit down before any dish gets the chance to make them glad that they did. That, in the end,
is the whole of what I mean by design: not the objects themselves, but the wanting-to-stay that a
good room quietly builds into an evening, glass by glass, without ever asking to be noticed for it.

“A good room doesn’t imitate a place. It remembers one.”